JMA 10-4 – June 2017

Part I – The civil war 1919-1921 FIRST SATURN-NEPTUNE CYCLE – EVOLUTIVE PHASE

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CIVIL WAR - END 1918 - 1919

EG H4 – 1918 – Fourth Quarter

November 11th. Retirement of germans in the Caucasus, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic States. November 18th. Coup in Omsk. Admiral Kolchak elected Regent of Russia.

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The astralities of November 11th and 17th are marked by two transits of Mercury and Mars. On the 11th of November, the day of the armistice on the western front between the Allies and

Germany, Mercury passes on the Apollo/Vulcanus mid-point at 4° Sagittarius, while Mars arrives on the Cardinal axis at 0° Capricorn, and will pass to the square of Admetos in Aries.

On November 18th, the Omsk coup d'etat which led Admiral Kolchak to the head of the Whites in Siberia preceded by one day the Full Moon conjoined with Uranus in Aquarius, in opposition to Saturn. Mercury transits the North Node, and Mars is very close to the square of Pluto.

Full Moon of November 19, 1918 - 5:33 UTC - Omsk

Réseau du Soleil – 85 – 25°10 Scorpion H8 : SO-LU-VE-SA-UR-PL

This Full Moon chart highlights the Saturn-Uranus opposition as well as Saturn and Pluto. The Sun on Saturn/Uranus can here correspond to a firm, if not rigid, attitude. Mars/Jupiter designates a military leader, Jupiter/Pluto may refer to secret financial ties and Cupido/Vulcanus signal a powerful alliance – In this case, that of all the anti-bolshevik forces, potentially united under the leadership of Admiral Kolchak, who had become Regent of Russia.

August 8, 1918 is, according to General Ludendorff, a day of mourning for the german army. On July 18,

the Allies attacked the french front. The Kaiser's army lost the second Battle of the Marne and its retreat seems final. The winter of 1918-1919 was dominated by the consequences of the defeat of the central Empires. As early as November 1918 the rapid withdrawal of the german troops occupying the Crimea and Ukraine began.

In the East, a first japanese division landed at Vladivostok from August 3, 1918. The goal of the japanese was not to annex Transbaikalia, but to consolidate their power in Manchuria and to act as they wished throughout the country region of the Transmandchourien and its junction with the Trans-Siberian. A white power in Siberia, firm and respected, would be an obstacle. They will therefore do whatever is in their power to counteract the efforts of the honest russian patriots like Kolchak. Speculating on the anarchy, they will favor the shady autonomy of small warlike feudalities, of which the ataman Semenov or the future general Ungern will be illustrations. On the other hand, Edouard Bénès, a member of the czechoslovak national council in exile in Paris, obtained from the french government the sending to Siberia of General Janin, with the double title of commander in chief of the czech Legion and head of the french military mission, charged as such with taking over the white armies of Siberia and helping them to drive back the bolsheviks.

In the North, during the uncertain period before Brest-Litovsk, it was feared that the germans would seek to seize Murmansk, which caused panic in the staffs, but also in the bolsheviks. On March 6, 1918, the local soviet asked for the protection of Admiral Kemp. In the name of the german threat, the english also occupy

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Arkhangelsk (21 July) where there are large depots of material. Under the protection of the british, a "supreme government of the northern region" was constituted, presided over by the socialist Tchaikovsky, but the real power was exercised by an englishman, general Poole, to whom general Ironside was to succeed. No longer seeing any use to this front, the english finally end up embarking on September 14, 1919.

In the West, from the end of 1918, the bolshevik government sent red armies to Estonia and Latvia. The red offensive in the baltic states is part of Trotsky's strategy in Voronezh on November 16, 1918 : the junction with the austrian revolution, which triumphs in Vienna and Budapest, will be done by Kiev, while support for the spartacists who rose in Berlin through Vilnius in Lithuania.

Finally, in the South, on December 18, 1918, a french expeditionary force landed in Odessa and sank into Ukraine under the command of general Berthelot. On February 19, 1919, the Black Sea fleet mutinied. This movement is accompanied by important demonstrations in France and mutinies in other naval units in Brest, Toulon, Cherbourg, Bizerte or the Gulf of Corinth. On 2 of April, the french command received orders from the government to evacuate Odessa in three days. The order is executed in an atmosphere of panic. Sebastopol must also be abandoned in hurry.

Thus, at the end of 1918, the bolsheviks can breathe. On the three fronts that encircle them, the white offensives have been stopped. The austro-german defeat of November 1918, leading to the withdrawal of troops from the Crimea, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic States, opened these immense territories to the lust of Moscow.

However, there are threats that can arise from siberian chaos. Many socialist-revolutionary deputies had taken the road to the Volga, a region favorable to them. They had reconstituted in Samara a miniature constituent Assembly, the Komuch, in other words "Committee of the members of the constituent Assembly". This Komuch, led by the socialist-revolutionary Nicolai D. Avksentiev, former minister of the Interior of Kerensky, functioned as a kind of independent government. Another government had also established itself in Omsk, in western Siberia, under the presidency of Vologodski. He was more to the right than that of Samara, and above all he brandished the green and white national flag, a symbol of siberian nationalism. Other governments had been formed in Tomsk, Chita, and Orenburg. From the 16th of April, 1918, General Horvath had established in Kharbin, a highly russified city of Manchuria, a "Far Eastern Government". At the same time, each of the nationalities of the siberian territory, Tatars, Bashkirs, Bouriates or Mongols, also claimed autonomy. A meeting was held in Ufa, on September 1, 1918, with a view to forming a single "anti-bolshevik" pan-Russian "government. With the Red Army approaching, delegates had just enough time before dispersing to form a "pan-russian Directory", which took refuge in Omsk. It can be seen that at that moment, completely discredited by the last years of the reign of Nicholas II, the monarchy had no longer any defender. Monarchism was then neither an opinion nor an appeal. This is a striking fact of the Russian revolution: there was no one to imagine a possible restoration.

It was then that landed in Vladivostok in mid-September, the former commander-in-chief of the Black Sea fleet in 1916, Admiral Kolchak, who traveled around the world before finding himself in the eastern end of the former tsarist empire. On September 21st, Kolchak embarked on the Trans-Siberian to Omsk. He travels with young and ambitious general Gajda, one of the leading figures in the czech Legion. Dominique Venner insists on the importance of this trip, which leads the two men to sympathize. This explains the excessive confidence which the admiral will show at first to Gajda and the czechs, and then to his brutal disillusion followed by an irremediable rupture. After a trip of more than three weeks over 6,000 kilometers, admiral Kolchak arrived in Omsk on October 15, 1918. One month later, a coup d'etat brought him to power on November 17, 1918. Admiral Koltchak is appointed Supreme Leader and took command of all russian armed forces of land and sea. In an address to the people, he specifies his objectives :

I am not on the path of reaction or on the fatal path of partisan politics. My main objectives are the creation of an effective army, the victory over bolshevism, and the establishment of law and order so that the people can freely choose the form of government they want and realize great ideas of freedom that are now proclaimed throughout the world.1

However, Kolchak is not a man of power or a warlord. He is a straight and firm man in his convictions, and Alexander Jevakhoff gives two testimonies. First, that of John Ward, elected Labor of the House of Commons, landed in Vladivostok with his battalion, arrived in Omsk mid October 1918 :

While my liaison officer was repeating the names of those present, a small energetic figure entered the room. For a moment the noise of conversations was interrupted ; the somber figure, with its dark, well-cut face, shook hands with a friendly officer before going away. I

1 VENNER, op. cit., p. 248.

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had the impression that I had seen a small, misguided, lonely and troubled person, without any friend, who came to a party to which she was not invited.

Then, the testimony of Captain Savitch, serving in the naval headquarters :

In the midst of this educated youth, convinced, mistress of his art, a young officer, of modest size, was particularly distinguished. His dry, sharp face breathed energy, his virile and strong voice, his manner of speaking and standing, all reflected the characteristics of his mental state, his will, his insistence to succeed, his ability to act, to order, to train others, to assume responsibilities. His comrades in the general staff surrounded him with a single respect, I should even say a true admiration ; his superiors reserved him a special confidence.2

EG H4 – 1919 – First quarter

March 2nd – 6th. First Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. March. Beginning of the Kolchak offensive towards Moscow. 22 mars. Mutineries in the french fleet and abandonment of Odessa to the bolsheviks.

2 JEVAKHOFF, op. cit., p. 411-412.

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NM – March 2, 1919 – 11:11 am UTC – Moscow – SU/MO : 71 – 10°50 Pisces

The foundation of the Third International was at the time of a New Moon at 11° Pisces. We will note the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction at 5° Cancer, on the "pivot of the powers," as well as a Mars-Hades conjunction at 26° Pisces. Saturn is strongly present by the three axes VP/Saturn, Mars/Saturn and Saturn/Hades at 11° Gemini, at the square of the luminaries. The lunation is located at the square of the axis of the Lunar Nodes, the North Node being conjoined at the Uranus/Poseidon mid-point - which can be considered here as the mark of the communist propaganda suddenly barging in the whole world.

On the western siberian front there are three theaters of operations. The theaters of the North and the Center

follow the direction of the two branches of the railway visible on the map from Omsk. One heads for Ekaterinenburg and Perm (Northern Army), the other for Ufa and Samara (Central Army). As for the Army of the South, its center is in Orenburg. It is under the command of General Ataman Doutov, better done, according to Dominique Venner, for political maneuvers than for war. In March 1919, the three white armies, commanded by Gajda, Khangine and Dutov, resumed the offensive. In a month and a half, they progress several hundred kilometers. Faced with such successes, the allied powers already imagine the armies of Kolchak marching on Moscow, while Denikin approaches it from the south and Yudenich threatens Petrograd. It was during this critical period for the Reds that a military leader from the Bolshevik party, Mikhail Vasilyevich Frounzé, was to impose himself. The Reds counter-offensive was launched at the end of April. At the end of June 1919, the front of the white armies broke up. At the end of July, the white armies of Siberia fainted in the endless space.

On the Southern front, at the time of the splendor of Kolchak at the end of 1918, the Whites had experienced a delicate period when the cossack units of the upper Don, affected by Bolshevik propaganda, had once again mutinied and demobilized. The "decossaiking" policy decided by the leadership of the Bolshevik party and which was the subject of a directive signed by Sverdlov on January 29, 1919, nevertheless brought the cossacks closer to the white armies and provoked the Viechenskaya insurrection in March 1919, which will dismantle in a short time the southern front of the Red Army. This directive of Sverdlov prescribed in particular to "practice massive terror against the rich cossacks by the general extermination". Finally, a new prestigious leader, Pierre Wrangel (1878-1928) appears on the Southern front, who, unlike other generals, is perfectly at ease in the civil war. In the last days of June 1919, Wrangel seized Tsaritsyn, a strategic node on the lower Volga (the future Stalingrad). In the spring of 1919, the entire North Caucasus was liberated by the Whites.

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EG H4 – 1919 – Second quarter

April 6th –7th – Evacuation of Odessa - Departure of the Romanovs May. Retreat of Kolchak. Denikin's victorious offensive on the South front. June 30th. Wrangel seizes Tsaritsyn.

The retreat of Kolchak occurs at the time of the transit of Mars in Taurus and Gemini, passing at the suare of Saturn during the mid-May lunar eclipse, then crossing the Uranus/Apollo opposition zone and passing, at the time of the solar eclipse of the beginning of June, the area of Vulcanus. This retreat will turn into a debacle in the following fall.

On April 6, 1919, the Allied forces left, without combat, the fifth city of the Russian Empire - Odessa - in the hands of the Bolsheviks. On April 7, the last Romanov leave the land on which their family ruled over three centuries. The dowager empress follows the grand duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, the former generalissimo of the russian armies, who embarks on the british battleship Marlborough. Only the sister of Nicholas II, grand duchess Olga, joins a boat of refugees departing for Novorossisk. The mother of Nicholas II arrives the last, in crew, with princess Yusupov. The Romanovs leave Russia.

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EG H4 – 1919 – Third quarter

July. Offensive of Denikin to the North. August. Beginning of the red counter-offensive against Denikin. September 14th . The english abandoned the Northern front, re-embarking to Murmansk and Archangelsk

In July, Denikin's great northward offensive takes place under the Mars transits on the Pluto-Admetos square zone at the beginning of the Cardinal signs. In August, the start of the red counter-offensive by the Boudienni cavalry occurred at the time of Jupiter's transit on the Zeus-Kronos area. The central point, August 17th, is constituted by the Saturn-Uranus opposition at the beginning of the Mutables signs, in the zone of Apollo transited by the axis of the Nodes.

Two contradictory movements were to mark the year 1919. The summer of 1919 saw immense peasant

revolts against the bolshevik power in the Middle-Volga and Ukraine, which enabled admiral Kolchak and general Denikin to break through the bolsheviks lines over hundreds of kilometers. A few months later, the uprising of the siberian peasants, exasperated by the restoration of the rights of the landowners, precipitated the defeat of admiral Kolchak in front of the Red Army.

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On July 3, 1919, Denikin informed his generals of his decision to march on Moscow. Under the orders of general Wrangel, the caucasian army which has just captured Tsaritsyn will march eastwards towards Saratov and Nizhny-Noborod. The army of the Don commanded by general Sidorin will march on Moscow by Voronezh and Riazan. Finally, the army of the Volunteers of general Mai-Maievsky, is reserved the direct advance from Kharkov, by Kursk, Orel and Tula. Nothing is provided to ensure the safety of the rear. Kiev, Kursk, Orel are taken. Mamontov's cavalry is at the gates of Voronezh. The whole South falls into their hands. But they do not have organized bases or support points in the rear and the front is too large for their forces.

Faced with this disquieting offensive, the Red high command hesitates and divides. The new commander-in-chief, Serge Kamenev (not to be confused with Trotsky's brother-in-law) proposes to strike eastwards towards Tsaritsyn, the Don and the North Caucasus, which has the advantage of overflowing The white armies and cut them from their rear. Trotsky opposed this directive for fear that an attack of the Don would come up against a relentless resistance from the cossacks and cement their alliance with Denikin, giving the latter the freedom to continue his march on Moscow. He proposes thus to advance by the Donets, industrial region, favorable to the Reds, in order to cut the forces of Denikin in two, attacking them at the weak point between the army of the Volunteers and the army of the Don. The Politburo, seized with the confit, approved Kamenev against Trotsky. Trotsky returned to Ukraine, ulcerated and in a state of semi-rupture with Lenin. However, things will happen as planned. The bulk of the red counter-offensive trampled on the foothills of the Don, while the white army of General Koutiepov threatened the arsenal of Tula. Recognizing his error implicitly, Kamenev resolved to modify his plans and return to Trotsky's original project, while on the northern front a new threat emerged with an offensive launched by Yudenich against Petrograd. Given the urgency and the obviousness, the Politburo and even Stalin give reason to Trotsky who immediately regains his bubbling energy and his capacities of coach.

But already the offensive of Denikin is exhausted. The front is too large for the white forces which have no organized support.

In Ukraine, the nationalist leader Petlioura established a board of directors which named him hetman (commander in chief) on February 11, 1919, when once again the Reds seized Kiev. On August 30, 1919, Petlioura entered Kiev. This is the fifth time in 15 months that the old capital changes hands. In the shadow, Nestor Makhno, an extraordinary guerrilla leader endowed with a powerful charisma but lacking political sense, supports Petlioura. Makhno was finally blundered by the bolsheviks which, after using him against Denikin and Wrangel, crushed him mercilessly in 1921. The white army thus tumbles into a retreat that will turn into a debacle. Two enemies have just dealt a fatal blow to the imposing machine mounted by Denikin : Makhno and the "greens" on his rear ; the red cavalry of Boudienni on the front. Indeed, Kamenev launches his cavalry under the command of Boudienni, a friend of Voroshilov and protected by Stalin, at the juncture of the army of the Volunteers (General Mai-Maievski) and the army of the Don (General Sidorin) between Orel and Voronege. Boudienni reprend Voronège le 24 octobre 1919. Boudienni resumed Voronege on October 24, 1919. Brutally, the white offensive was stopped. Boudienni continued his triumphant offensive until Rostov where he suffered a failure before resuming his lead by turning the enemy positions.

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EG H4 – 1919 – Fourth quarter

October 10th. Failure of Yudenich's offensive on Petrograd. October 24th. Beginning of the collapse of Denikin in the South and the collapse of Kolchak in Siberia

Full Moon – October 9, 1919 New Moon - October 23, 1919

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The Full Moon of October 9, 1919, at 15° Aries-Libra is related to an opposition of Mars (conjoined to Apollo) to Uranus. At the same time, Jupiter transits on the area of the Neptune-Cupido conjunction in Leo. Note also the presence of the VP/Zeus mid-point at 0° Gemini and the presence of the Moon on the VP/Kronos and Hades/Kronos axes at 15° Aries.

During the New Moon of October 23, 1919, at 23° Libra, the luminaries transit the area of the Zeus-Kronos square. We also observe the transit of Mercury at the square of the Jupiter-Neptune-Cupido triple conjunction and above all the square of the Mars-Saturn conjunction at Vulcanus, a configuration that signals the beginning of the Denikin collapse in the south and the break-up Of Kolchak in Siberia.

In October 1919, a new threat arose on the Northwest front, which directly targeted Petrograd. General

Nikolayev Nikolayevich Yudenich became, in early 1918, thanks to the english, the commander-in-chief of the white Baltic forces, based in Narva and Pskov. On October 10, 1919, his army set out to help Kolchak and Denikin. On the 20th the Whites entered Tsarskoye Selo, the former imperial residence ; they are thirty kilometers from Petrograd. Trotsky arrived on the spot on October 16th to organize the defense. On October 20th, he gave the signal for a counter-attack. Petrograd escapes the whites who take refuge in Estonia where they are disarmed. On the northern front, the english have already re-deployed all their troops since September 14th in Mourmanks and Arkhangelsk.

In Siberia, autumn 1919 saw the end of Kolchak. On November 13, 1919, the red Vanguards were only a few kilometers from Omsk. On the same day, Kolchak left his capital in the direction of Irkutsk and began a retreat in the early winter which would surpass in horror that of Napoleon in 1812. It will make infinitely more victims, causing death by typhus, hunger and cold, tens of thousands of women and children, of old people. Not one will escape. On December 25th, the Kolchak train reached Nijne-Oudinsk station, 500 kilometers from Irkutsk. Immobilized under the threat of the guns of a czech armored train, he stayed there for two weeks. During these two weeks, general Janin will not answer once more to the increasingly pressing appeals of Koltchak. He took revenge on the admiral who patronized him from their first interview one year earlier. On January 4, 1920, Irkutsk passed entirely under the control of a red government which demanded the delivery of Kolchak. On January 13th, a railway soviet obtained from the czechs the admiral was handed over to them. Two days later, the regent was taken to Irkutsk Prison. At the dawn of February 7, 1920, Kolchak was executed.

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CIVIL WAR – 1920

EG H4 – 1920 – First quarter

February 7th. Execution of Kolchak in Irkutsk. March 27th. Failed Denikin's intervention in the Kuban. Evacuation to the Crimea.

Full Moon – February 4, 1920

The execution of Admiral Kolchak in

Irkutsk follows three days the Full Moon of February 4th at 14° Lion-Aquarius, reinforced by an opposition of Mercury at the Jupiter-Cupido conjunction. Venus is in opposition to Pluto at 7° Cancer-Capricorn, while Mars transits in dissonance to the Zeus-Kronos square, at the beginning of the Fixes signs

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EG H4 – 1920 – Second quarter

April 4th. Resignation of Denikin replaced by Wrangel. April-September Wrangel takes over the White Army. April. Intervention of the Poles in Ukraine, driven by the Reds marching on Warsaw. .

PL - 3 avril 1920

On April 3, 1920, on the eve of the resignation of Denikin, who passed the torch at Wrangel, a Full Moon took place at 13° Aries Balance. The key figure is constituted by the Saturn-Uranus opposition at the double square of Vulcanus.

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The year 1920 will be marked by the campaign of Poland, launched by Lenin in the summer of 1920, while the second Congress of the Comintern was being held in Moscow with a view to taking Warsaw. Russia had been at war with the newly independent Poland since April 1920, when the ooles had started a campaign to recover the territories of Ukraine which they considered traditionally polish. Indeed, on April 26, 1920, Polish troops entered Ukraine and soon took Kiev. But the victory of Pilsudski will be brief : Kiev is resumed on June 12th. While Trotsky wished to sign a peace with Poland at the best conditions, Lenin wished to continue the campaign so brilliantly engaged, to march on Warsaw, to proclaim a republic of the Soviets, and who knows how, to proceed in the direction of Berlin. Lenin gives the order to march on Warsaw with the slogan "The world revolution will pass on the corpse of Poland !" Trotsky bows, but will not participate in the campaign.

On the Southern front, in the spring of 1920, Wrangel succeeded Denikin. The disagreement between these two generals was common knowledge at the end of 1919, and Wrangel withdrew for a time to Constantinople, from where he will be recalled. In March 1920, the white troops enclosed in the Kuban streamed back in disorder in front of the Reds and were soon driven back to the Black Sea. Their evacuation to the Crimea took place in panic on 27 of March, by Novorossisk, on english, french and russian ships. The white army has practically ceased to exist and Denikin decides to abandon his functions. On April 4, 1920, Denikin was one of the last to embark on the british destroyer captain Sacken with his chief of staff general Romanovsky. In his last order, Denikin appointed lieutenant-general baron Pierre Wrangel as his successor to the command of the Armed Forces of Southern russia, but not as Supreme Leader of all the russians.

In a few days, overflowing with energy, Wrangel infused a new blood into this last white reduction, succeeding in turning a desperate situation. He entrusted the academic Pierre Struve with the direction of Foreign Affairs. On July 20, 1920, he obtained the de facto recognition of the Wrangel government by France, and then his recognition de jure on August 18th. In addition, Wrangel appealed to the most capable Statesman of the former imperial government, M.A. Krivochéine, who had been the close collaborator of Pierre Stolypine. His aim is to create a white republic that is a different model of society, both modern and traditional, russian, national and social. In June 1920, the Whites seized Melitopol, the capital of Northern Taurida. Fifteen days later, they are masters of the whole province. Their food supply is now assured and enormous quantities of materials have fallen into their hands.

EG H4 – 1920 – Third quarter

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August 20th. Miracle of the Vistula. The Weygand plan routed the Reds of Toukhachevsky in front of Warsaw

August 20, 1920

On August 20, 1920, Warsaw was

saved thanks to the Weygand plan which routed Tukhachevsky's troops. This event occurs when Mercury in Lion, at the end of his downshift loop, moves to the Nodes square on the zone where five weeks ago it was in conjunction with Neptune. Mars in Scorpio transits to the sesqui-square of Admetos in Aries. But the most striking signature of this victory is the presence of Jupiter at 29° Lion, conjoined to the fixed star Regulus as well as to the Sun/Jupiter and Mars/Vulcanus mid-points.

Feeling that he was winning the civil war in Russia, Lenin insisted in August 1920 for that the

goal be shifted towards the world revolution. Lenin was in fact the mastermind of the "Warsaw Campaign", which aimed at the "sovietization" of Poland and the "revolutionization" in Germany. As Dimitri Volkogonov pointed out, during Politburo meetings Lenin behaved like a player who has gained a significant gain and wants to double the stake. The rest of the Politburo expressed only a symbolic resistance. Lenin, who had only a weak understanding of strategy, directed the campaign himself, and ended with a disgraceful defeat. The Poles had obtained from France an important military mission (of which Captain de Gaulle belonged), led by General Waygand, chief of staff of marshal Foch. Weygand will be the real strategist of the polish defense at the decisive moment of the battle of the Vistula. Opposite, Toukhachevsky is at the head of the armies of the North-West. His offensive began on July 4, 1920 on the Berezina. In early August, it is in sight of Warsaw and a few steps from Berlin. However, the southern front, instead of supporting the offensive on Warsaw, turned west towards Lvov: this decision, which would cost the Reds the victory, was taken under the influence of the political commissar, Stalin. On the 6th of August, 1920, a plan of battle was arrested on the urgent advice of general Weygand, who skillfully left the benefit to marshal Pilsudski. Warsaw is saved and Lenin is forced to propose peace that will establish common borders favorable to Poland.

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EG H4 – 1920 – Fourth quarter

November 16th. Evacuation of the Crimea by Wrangel.

The evacuation of the Crimea by

Wrangel on November 16, 1920, was a moving moment, since for the last time a French ship, the Waldeck-Rousseau, saluted a Russian ship in Russian waters. At 2:00 pm precisely that day sounds the end of ancient Russia.

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The civil war is over. It will last beyond 1921 in the Far East. Placed under the vigilant attention of the

japanese, Transbaikalia was partly overshadowed by the Moscow authority, which accepted in April 1920 the creation of a "buffer state", the Far East Republic. On February 28, 1919, the idea was launched to create a Great Mongolia, from Lake Baikal to Tibet. Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, born in Revel, Estonia, on December 29, 1885, is welcomed as a liberator, many mongol princes seeing him as the one who can liberate the country from the chinese occupation. At the end of October 1920, Ungern launched an offensive on Urga to drive out the chinese. The attack is repulsed. A second offensive, in January 1921, took the chinese by surprise. After a few days of fighting, Ourga is taken on February 2nd in an orgy of blood. Finally, Ungern was shot on September 17, 1921. With him disappeared the last white general. 1921 : KRONSTADT AND THE NPE

EG H4 – 1921 – First quarter

February 2nd. Ungern seizes Ourga. [September 17th. Ungern shot in Novorossiysk.] March 2nd – 8th. Kronstadt Sailors Uprising.

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March 8, 1920

At the end of January and beginning of

February 1921, the Knots transit in dissonance of the Zeus-Kronos square at the beginning of the Fixes signs.

On the 8th of March, when the repression of the Kronstadt sailors' uprising ends, Venus transits this zone, while Mercury, in its phase of retrogradation, transits the zone of the Uranus-Vulcanus square at 7° of the Mutables signs.

In March 1921, while the 10th party Congress was held in Moscow, the sailors and soldiers of Kronstadt's fortress-island on the Baltic Sea, at 30 kilometers from Petrograd, revolted against bolshevik domination, demanding an authentically government based on totally socialist Soviets. Lenin responds by sending 50,000 Red Army soldiers to crush the insurgency.

In February 1921, the workers of Petrograd and the sailors of Kronstadt decided to refuse the presence of the red Guards in the factories. The military discipline imposed by Trotsky, infatuated with taylorism, was so hard that death was constantly watching for them. The troubles spread to Moscow. The protesters are demanding the resignation of Lenin and the convening of a new Constituent Assembly. Panic seizes communist leaders when Kronstadt sailors join workers.

On March 1, 1921, a revolutionary soviet took the direction of the fortress. Strategic points are occupied. Kronstadt became a revolutionary commune. The delegates of the sailors adopted a long resolution calling for new free and secret elections, the end of the party's dictatorship, the abolition of the Cheka, the release of political prisoners, the end of requisitions, freedom of craftsmanship and Trade. In all Russia the announcement of this rebellion is the effect of an earthquake. The insurgents rallied the aeronautical squadron of Oranienbaum, but Petrograd dispatches troops encircling the base, arresting the mutineers and shooting 45 of them for the example. On March 5th, Trotsky arrived in Petrograd and took matters into his own hands. He entrusts the command of the assault forces to Toukhachevsky. A first combined infantry-aviation attack was launched on March 8th. It is a bitter failure. The waves of assault are swept away by the shooting of the fortress and by the resistance of the 16,000 sailors of the garrison. Eight days later the battle lasted all day and continued in Kronstadt through fierce street fighting with bayonets and grenades. Taking advantage of the night, the rebels flee to Finland. Toukhachevsky remains master of the field, but has lost nearly 25,000 men, killed or wounded. Opposite, there are 600 deaths, 1,000 wounded and 2,000 prisoners.

Dimitri Volkogonov was able to specify the extent of the repression in the following days on the basis of the secret documents : on March 20, 1921 a special commission sentenced 167 seafarers of the Petropavlovsk ship to death and the following day 32 others were shot ; on March 24th, another 27 executions. The Cheka of Petrograd alone condemned 2,103 men to be shot. The commander of the 7th Army, Toukhachevsky, ordered an attack on the ships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol by using asphyiant and poisonous gases. In addition to the executions, 6,450 men were imprisoned or exiled, who were later shot under Stalin. With the agreement of Lenin, Trotsky had been one of the organizers of the bloody repression of the revolt. Here is the judgment of the chief of the Red Army on Kronstadt :

The revolt of Kronstadt was nothing else but the armed reaction of the petty bourgeoisie to the difficulties of the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.3

3 VOLKOGONOV Dimitri, Trotski, HarperCollins, Londres, 1996, p. 394.

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And Volkogonov recalls that, for Max Eastman, Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine, the rot began with the crash of the Kronstadt revolt in March 1921.

The tragedy of Kronstadt undoubtedly led to an acceleration of the abandonment of "war communism" and Lenin's reorientation, which was essentially tactical, towards a "new political economy" (NPE), which took up several of the claims of the Kronstadt commune. Lenin had to recognize the disastrous consequences of Bolshevik practice: the system could not function at its beginnings without private property, rash nationalization, constant requisitioning and confiscation were unable to feed hungry Russia. While taking into account the advice of more sober heads in his entourage and softening his policy with regard to private property, Lenin made clear that the NPE was only a temporary gesture, a retreat. On March 3, 1922 he wrote to Kamenev : "It would be a great mistake to believe that the NPE is bringing an end to terror. We will return to terror and economic terror ». The concessions of the NPE left intact a socialized hard core. On the one hand, NPE restores freedom of trade ; paves the way for new market growth ; recourse to the monetary calculation ; substitutes for requisitions tax in kind ; releases the small and medium industry. But, on the other hand, the monopoly of foreign trade is safeguarded ; heavy industry, transport, large-scale credit are maintained state property. For David Rousset, the NPE registers the collapse of war communism because it is incompatible with the capabilities of the then existing technology, and it causes a general regression :

War communism accomplishes what Marx had envisaged as an unlikely hypothesis : the socialization of indigence. It resurrects the struggle for the necessary.4

In his speech to the fourth Congress of the Communist International on November 13, 1922, Lenin's last

speech before international congresses must admit that war communism has raised against the bolshevik power "very large masses not only of peasants but also of workers". David Rousset finally sees in the NPE a point of junction between world capitalism and state capitalism which is strengthened in Russia :

The NPE is a bridge between Russian capitalism and world capitalism. However a regulated circulation bridge. The monopoly of foreign trade opens only one path. Through mixed companies, the state is the only possible customer. The junction operate between global capitalism and state capitalism.5

THE TEACHINGS OF THE CIVIL WAR

According to estimates by Dimitri Volkogonov, the total number of victims of the White Terror and the

Red Terror, famine and disease, including those who have fled the country, ranges between 10 and 13 million. Then, in the period between civil war and collectivization, that is, in the "happy years of NPE", about one million people perished in the camps or in the extermination of anti-soviet resistance in the country. Between 1929 and 1953, the balance sheet increased by twenty-one and a half thousand victims.

In the eyes of Dominique Venner, the civil war is a wealth of lessons for the historian. It announces a new form of conflict, the massive intervention of ideological passion and psychological weapons, the intensive use of terror, partisan war, but also the break with the war of positions of 1914-1918. With twenty years ahead of time, the great battles in the South, Kursk, Rostov, Orel, Tsaritsyne (Stalingrad), anticipate the decisive clashes of the Second World War. But it also signs a revenge of reality on utopia :

This war provides a striking example of the reconstruction of an army after the period of revolutionary decomposition. Faced with the test of facts, the egalitarian and pacifist utopia is thrown to the nettles.6

4 ROUSSET David, La société éclatée (The broken society), Grasset, 1973, p. 51. 5 Ibid., p. 52. 6 VENNER, op. cit, p. 323.

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Among the novelties is the fact that the Red Army, as the name suggests, is not a national army but that a party. A party that intervenes directly in strictly military matters and does not allow the army to intervene in political decisions. The Red Army is at its service, at the service of a conquering messianism which justifies absolutely everything. It is an army which breaks with the code of honor and the laws of war established after the Thirty Years War by the European armies. Moreover, civil war has invented the total modern war that retreats the bounds of conscious cruelty, spares nothing and nobody, and intends to mobilize all and all up to the inner fiber of each being. Dominique Venner also points out the hallucinating armosphere of the civil war : a grotesque universe, where the characters with power appear as escapees of psychiatric asylums.

It is a world where all moral and social rules have been pulverized by the cataclysm of war and revolution. The limits imposed on the drives by culture and conventions have jumped, releasing passions in the rough, raising everything exceptional, making each soldier in turn a tormentor or a martyr. This was true of the whites as well as of the Reds, but the latter were better able to take advantage of this cauldron of witches which suited their temperament of marginal professionals.7

As regards the relations between the forces involved, the Reds have two advantages. A quantitative

advantage : from the beginning of the civil war, Red Army personnel were superior. It inherited the Imperial military administration, staff cadres partially in office, barracks, depots of arms and considerable ammunition, and arsenals for their manufacture. It will thus be able to carry out a relatively methodical mobilization which will increase its workforce from about 200,000 men in May 1918 to 5,600,000 in October 1920. And a strategic advantage: the dispersal of the white forces of Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, General Denikin in the South, General Youdenitch in the Baltic region, while the Reds can maneuver in all directions from the central area they hold around Moscow. As to know what were the reasons for the failure of the Whites, Dimitri Volkogonov suggests the lack of clear and attractive ideas and the fact that white terror alienated them from the peasants and ordinary citizens. In 1918 the greater part of the russian population rejected the bolshevik revolution ; yet, in the end, the bolsheviks prevailed. The bolsheviks succeeded, despite a fantastic desertion rate, to create an army of three million men. By resorting to systematic terror, coercion, constraint, hostage-taking and a vast system of punitive measures and propaganda on a scale never seen in Russia or elsewhere, they forced peasants and workers to fight for the soviet regime in the hope that at least some of the incentives measures promised by the commissioners would be realized. The white movement also failed because it was driven by soldiers and not politicians. The white generals did not realize that the only unifying idea that was acceptable was an idea that advocated the development of Russia - that is, according to Volkogonov, the idea that was born in 1917 and culminated in the constituent Assembly.

Thus, at the end of the civil war, an international party of civil war was in possession of a powerful State. Such was the novelty introduced by the revolution of 1917 and the triumph of the Reds over the whites. This party had the ambition to destroy all the States and to overthrow everywhere the existing social order by carrying the civil war. The struggle which was on the horizon promised to be a european civil war until it was global. For much of the 20th century, europeans lived, consciously or not, under the shadow of a latent civil war that altered their representations and behavior. Starting from this conclusion, Dominique Venner arrives at a conclusion that joins the work of the historian Ernest Nolte on the fundamental moment of the October Revolution as catalyst of a chain reaction :

The October Revolution is indeed the starting point of a chain reaction in which italian fascism and german National Socialism emerge as responses to communism – some revolutionary type responses, which distinguish them completely from the white armies.

Complex alchemy of which the figure of Mussolini testfies :

Mussolini himself came from revolutionary socialism. By all his fibers he was closer to Nietzsche than to Marx. The experience of war transformed him, forging in him this new synthesis of jacobinism and revolutionary socialism that was to become fascism.8

7 Ibid., p. 329. 8 Ibid., p. 347.

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THE FAMINE OF 1921-1922 AND THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION Civil war was not the last scourge on Russia : the country suffered, in 1921-1022, from a terrible famine.

The devastated countryside was incapable of feeding the population. Famine took root in several provinces, and in the towns the workmen received only a miserable ration of bread. This did not prevent the government from selling wheat abroad. Thirty-six million people were suffering from hunger, the dead were daily counted in thousands. An extraordinary uprising took place in Tambov, which began in August 1921. Moscow had to resort to considerable forces to repress it and to the asphyxiating gases.

Lenin, for his part, did not fail to derive a political advantage from the famine used as a weapon of war in order to break any active or passive resistance. This is evidenced by the text of Lenin quoted by Vladimir Volkoff :

We must distribute privations in such a way as to safeguard the proletarian government. This is our only principle. The monopoly of bread, bread tickets, and generalized chores, that is what, in the hands of the all-powerful Soviets, is the best way to count et control. This means of controlling and forcing to work is much stronger than the laws of the Convention and its guillotine. The guillotine only frightened, only to break the active resistances. We want more. We must not only frighten the capitalists so that they feel the omnipotence of the proletarian government and do not even think of opposing it to active resistance. We must also break passive resistance, which is undeniably even more formidable and harmful. And we have the means. This means is the monopoly of bread, the receipts of bread, the generalized chore.9

Lenin was also thinking of putting the famine crisis to a profit to confiscate the Church's property and, in this way, to cut its wings once and for all. The idea that aid to the hungry came from the Church and from western charity was odious to the bolsheviks. Patriarch Tikhon had asked to meet Lenin to discuss the question of the monastery of the Holy Trinity Saint Sergius in the environs of Moscow, which Lenin had ordered to be transformed into a museum of atheism. Tikhon might protest, implore, write petitions, nothing could be done. The Bolsheviks seemed to believe that all contact with the clergy was for them a compromise, and Lenin intended to set an example of the conduct to be taken with regard to the Church. He refused to meet with the patriarch or any other prelate who would seek to establish a modus vivendi with the new power. He did not want to hold talks with the very people he intended to liquidate at the first opportunity.

In Russia in 1921-1922 there were about thirty-six million people suffering from hunger. During the course of 1922, gold and the value of about nineteen million rubles from the churches were distributed. However, famine took on appalling proportions. People were feeding on carrion and human bodies. On February 23, 1922, a decree of the government confiscated all the values preserved in the churches of Russia - about 80,000, mostly orthodox. The party organizations, the GPU, and specially created commandos then entered the churches where they read the decree and began by demanding that the whole of the treasures be delivered voluntarily. Reiterating the Church's commitment to helping the victims of famine, Tikhon called sacrilege the acts of confiscation.

Dimitri Volkogonov quotes from Lenin's letter to Molotov, dated March 19, 1922, a letter from which the text should not be copied but merely communicated to all members of the Politburo so that they add their comments on the original. It is a long six-page letter with very carefully weighed formulations :

There are 99 chances out of 100 of mortally striking the enemy to the head with total success, and guaranteeing us positions, for us essential, for the decades to come. With these hungry people who feed on human flesh, with the roads strewn with hundreds, even thousands of corpses, it is now and only now that we can (and therefore must) confiscate the Church's goods with a fierce, ruthless energy. We can thus obtain a treasure of several hundred million rubles-gold (think of the wealth of certain monasteries). Without this treasury, no state activity in general, no economic edification in particular, and no defense of our positions (at the Geneva Conference of 1922, when Soviet Russia and the Allies tried unsuccessfully to

9 VOLKOFF Vladimir, La Trinité du mal ou réquisitoire pour servir au procès posthume de Lénine, Trotski, Staline (The Trinity of Evil or an indictment for the posthumous trial of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin), de Fallois editions / L’Âge d’Homme, 1991, p. 65.

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bring about a reconciliation) is conceivable. We have to, at all cost, appropriate this treasure of several hundred thousand rubles (perhaps even several billion).10

In this text, not a word about relief to the hungry. During all the years that he was in power, Lenin seemed

obsessed with confiscations and requisitions - a single and immense process of spoliation. The outrageous war of Lenin against the Church of Russia is comparable to that which Stalin had set

against the peasantry. It has probably inflicted on the Church the most serious physical and spiritual damages it has had to endure in its history. On May 4, 1922, a decree instituting the death penalty for priests was issued. Between 14,000 and 20,000 priests and lay activists were put to death. In his letter, Lenin asserted that "the more we shoot members of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie, the better it will be". The Church was quickly swallowed up as a party servant with an impressive number of Party members infiltrated into her staff. Of the 80,000 churches listed in 1905 there were only 11,525 in 1950.

Throughout the country, quasi-military expeditions were launched against the churches and the clergy. Synagogues, mosques and Catholic churches were not spared :

At night, the crackling of the shootings was heard from the Cheka caves or the surrounding forests. The bodies of the priests and laymen executed were piled up in ravines. Among the shock troops were many common criminals, having made prison for armed robbery.11

Large sums were allocated to the needs of the Party hierarchy ; thousands of houses confiscated from the

bourgeoisie in the Moscow region were thus embellished with furniture and other holy objects. Pillage extended to sacred objects. In early May 1922, the Politburo ordered the Moscow court to: 1) immediately bring Tikhon to trial ; 2) to pronounce death sentences against priests. Lenin's instructions were clear : "the best thing is to shoot the most reactionary representatives of the clergy and the bourgeoisie" and also "the priests must be condemned to death". In 1922 alone, the clergy alone lost 2,691 secular priests, 1,972 monks, and 3,447 murdered nuns. As it was embarrassing to execute Tikhon, the Cheka had found other ways to shorten the life of the patriarch, then 60 years old. Joseph Unschlicht, one of the deputies of Dzerzhinsky at the head of the Cheka, insisted on the immediate arrest of the patriarch, despite protests at the international level. Interned at the Donskoy monastery, Tikhon was subjected to routine treatment: interrogations, threats, pressures and attempts at corruption. On June 16, 1923, the Patriarch signed a declaration that his GPU jailers had obviously written or dictated. Tikhon, broken, died a year later, following a bout of angina pectoris, on April 7, 1925 (at 11:45 pm, at the Bakunin Hospital, Ostojenka Street).

10 VOLKOGONOV Dimitri, Le vrai Lénine (The real Lenin), Robert Laffont, Paris, 1995, p. 343-344. 11 Ibid., p. 344.

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LENIN, TROTSKY AND STALIN IN THE CIVIL WAR

LENIN Vladimir Volkoff analyzes without complacency the tone used by Lenin, which testifies to his obsession

with the most violent means of repression :

Lenin begins by laughing when we told him that such of his opponents were murdered on their hospital bed, that others were lynched, but soon he takes the initiative. The words "mass terror", "pitiless mass terror" constantly return to his mouth. He has the gluttony of murder : "As long as we do not apply terror to speculators - shooting on the spot - nothing will succeed". We must "repress without mercy the anarchist attempts of drunkards, thugs, counter-revolutionaries". Care must be taken to "clean the russian soil of all pests". If the snow is not swept as it should be, the officials "will be shot".12

For his part, Stéphane Courtois quotes a message addressed by Lenin on August 9, 1918 to the soviet of

Nizhny Novgorod :

Immediately, a dictatorial "troika" must be formed, mass terror must immediately be introduced, or the hundreds of prostitutes who drink the soldiers, all ex-officers, etc., must be shot or deported. Not a minute to lose. We must act resolutely : massive searches. Execution for carrying weapons. Mass deportations of mensheviks and other suspect elements.13

The next day, Lenin wrote another letter to the bolsheviks of Penza :

Comrades ! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without mercy. The interests of the entire revolution demand it, for everywhere the "final struggle" with the kulaks is now engaged. It is necessary to make an example. 1) Hang (and I say hang so that people see it) no less than 100 kulaks, rich, known blood drinkers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Grab all their grain. 4) Identify the hostages. Do this so that, for hundreds of miles around, people see, tremble, know and say: they kill and will continue to kill bloodthirsty kulaks. Telegraph that you have received and executed these instructions. Yours, Lenin.14

Volkogonov recalls that at an earlier period in October 1905, from the peaceful and orderly world of

Geneva, he wrote a series of articles to be published in St. Petersburg which were in fact instructions for the organization of an armed uprising.

One of them, entitled "Tasks for the base of the revolutionary army", refers to "independent military actions" and "crowd management". He recommends that "units arm themselves as best they can (with guns, revolvers, bombs, knives, american punch, sticks, paraffin-soaked cloths, ropes for rope ladders, spades for digging barricades, gun coton, barbed wire, nails to stop the cavalry, etc. ". Places and people, even disarmed, were to be prepared "to throw stones at the soldiers, to pour boiling from the windows, to throw acid on the police, and to steal government money." It was, he wrote, of the utmost importance to encourage the murder of spies, policemen, gendarmes, Hundred Blacks, just as it was criminal to trust the "democrats," just good at holding a liberal salon ».15

Lenin's theory of revolution proposed nothing but these methods of inhuman terror. Shortly after the

bolshevik coup, Gorky observed :

Lenin and his comrades-in-arms believe that they can commit any crime, such as the Petrograd massacre, the devastation of Moscow, the abolition of freedom of speech, senseless arrests - all the abominations once committed by Plehve And Stolypin. This is where his

12 VOLKOFF, La Trinité du Mal (The Trinity of Evil), p. 62. 13 COURTOIS Stéphane, Le livre noir du communisme (The black book of communism), Robert Laffont, Paris, 1997, p. 84. 14 VOLKOGONOV, Lenin, p. 90. 15 Ibid., p. 90.

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leader today leads the proletariat, and it must be understood that Lenin is not an omnipotent magician but a cold-blooded conjurer who spares neither the honor nor the life of the proletarians.16

was during his war against the kulaks that Lenin introduced the term "enemy of the people", that he

institutionalized the taking of hostages, created prison units in the army and organized concentration camps. According to Victor Tchernov, he was "a virtual Robespierre". Lenin's language became that of the inquisitor, the prosecutor, and the executioner. By the orders and instructions he issued, Lenin contributed greatly to exacerbate the cruelty inherent in the civil war. Dimitri Volkogonov adds to this the observation of a cynical calculation for not to appear as the great authorizer of the repression :

It is true that in many of the articles he published and in the numerous speeches he published during this period, he rarely demanded the shooting of counter-revolutionaries and traitors. He preferred to give his radical instructions in coded telegrams, confidential notes or anonymous decrees in the name of the Sovnarkom. He cared about his good reputation and did not want to stain him with a reputation as a hangman. 17

Lenin also sometimes intervened to guide judicial decisions. He did not often speak to the Politburo, but

when he did, his word had the force of law, and his ideas were generally radical. Dimitri Volkogonov quotes the case of one of his interventions relating to Baron Ungern :

On the eve of a meeting of the Politburo on August 27, 1921, when he learned that the White general baron von Ungern-Sternberg had been captured in Mongolia, he proposed : "We should lay a solid charge and if guilt is evident, there is no doubt, a public court should be organized, executed as soon as possible and shot ". After two minutes of discussion, a telegram was sent to Novonikolaevsk, in Siberia, and on the 15th of September at noon, before an immense crowd gathered in a local theater, the audience began. The session was conducted hastily in three hours, and the sentence, prepared at Moscow three weeks earlier, was received by the public with thunderous applause. Thus, although the trial was public, his result had been duly prepared behind the scenes.18

Lenin, as well as Trotsky, both showed the greatest contempt for the freedom of the press. The savagery of

the civil war instilled in the russian people the feeling that death, imprisonment and coercion were normal conditions of life. To reinforce this state of mind, it was necessary for the bolsheviks to abandon the slogans of freedom thanks to which they had come to power. The first measures of Lenin after October 1917, were aimed at prohibiting the non-bolshevik press. Soon the idea of a free press, as well as individual rights, were regarded as profoundly heretical and counter-revolutionary. In a letter dated August 1921, addressed to Gabriel Miasnikov, a Bolshevik criticizing the suppression of democracy, Lenin called freedom of the press "a weapon in the hands of the world bourgeoisie." Trotsky also claimed the right to violence and the banning of newspapers hostile to the bolsheviks:

During the civil war, the right to use violence belongs only to the oppressed. Our victory over our opponents is not yet complete and the newspapers are for us a weapon. In these circumstances, the ban on newspapers is a measure of self-defense.

Lenin abounded in the same vein :

The civil war is not over yet. To tolerate the existence of the bourgeois press means to cease to be socialist. The one who speaks of freedom of the press goes back and stops our march forward towards socialism. 19

16 Ibid., p. 96. 17 Ibid., p. 217. 18 VOLKOGONOV Dimitri, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998, p. 64-65. 19 JEVAKHOFF, op. cit., p. 204.

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TROTSKY Although Trotsky ended up becoming the victim himself, he was one of the chief architects of

"bureaucratic absolutism," but there is no awareness of this fact in his writings. Recourse to the deportation of unwanted policies had been practiced while he was in power, and far from denouncing it, he had considered it as a normal instrument of his revolutionary practice. Red terror was an essential weapon of the revolution. The years of revolution and civil war were the culmination of Trotsky's life. He was regarded as standing beside Lenin, with whom he was in perfect harmony. Their intellectual and political collaboration was based on their fanatical attachment to the ideas of revolution and radical restucturing of Russia. Trotsky saluted the war in which he saw a chance to both eliminate the exploiting classes in Russia and to push the workers of other countries towards the world revolution.

The Russian civil war was transformed into one of the bloodiest in history. From March 1918, Trotsky was both a commissioner of military affairs (and later also naval affairs) and president of the Supreme Council of war of the Republic. At the time when he took office (after leading Foreign Affairs until the Brest-Litovsk Treaty), he faced a multitude of problems : the revolt led by Kaledin in the region of Don, the Dutov campaign in the southern Ural regions, the Dovbor-Mousnitski insurrection in Belarus, the advance of the germans and austro-hungarians in Ukraine, the incursion by the Turkish forces into Transcaucasia, the rebellions of the Dashnaks in Armenia and the Mussavatians in Azerbaijan.

By entrusting Trotsky with the task of forming the Red Army, Lenin exercised judgment. Though he lacked military knowledge and experience, Trotsky was a brilliant organizer, as hard and relentless as any bolshevik leader. He compensated for what he lacked in military knowledge and technology through a comprehensive political approach to defense and military organization, as well as his astonishing energy and ability to inspire people. In September 1918, he established the revolutionary War Council of the Republic, of which he was president until 1923, responsible for operational and strategic planning, political control, revolutionary tribunals and inspection. The use of force by the Bolsheviks in practically all areas of state policy was bound to provoke protests, open resistance and a general refusal to cooperate. In the army this manifested itself in mass desertions, the summit of which was reached in the second half of 1918 and at the beginning of 1919.

A mass of documents produced by Trotsky during the civil war testify to the fact that he was ready, for what he considered good for the revolution, to resort to all means, including the manufacture and use of asphyxiating gases. Deception and manipulation were ordinary practices for the bolsheviks and Trotsky was a master in the matter. At a critical juncture in the spring of 1919, Trotsky was preparing to take an appalling step. He telegraphed to Moscow : "It is necessary to find a way to use asphyxiating gases. We need to find a responsible person to lead this work". Several of the solutions proposed by Trotsky were severe, and even savage. Thus, all former officers who refused to cooperate had to be reported and "put under lockdown in concentration camps".

Two particularly odious methods were widely used by Trotsky: the taking of hostages of the families of the officers and the constitution of blocking units, in charge of shooting the fugitives. During the monthly mobilizations in 1918, the former tsarist officers were arrested, together with their families and even their uncles and aunts. The entire family was held in prison until the authorities found that the officer was an "accommodating hero". They was then released, the officer to be incorporated, the others remained under surveillance. It was enough for an army commissioner to report unfavorably on this "military specialist" so that his uncles and aunts, not to mention his wife and children, would be sent to forced labor or returned to prison. In Trotsky's eyes, repression was an element of the military structure, a method of educating both officers and men. Trotsky thus formulated the policy of the hostages in an order N° 2 of November 1919 : "The families of the traitors must be arrested immediately." With the approval of Moscow, Trotsky decided to place blocking units behind unreliable detachments with orders to shoot them if they retreated without permission. Stalin applied the same policy in 1941-42. These blocking units appeared for the first time in August 1918 on the eastern front of the First Army under the command of Toukhachevsky, who was the first to order such shootings. In December 1918, special detachments were ordered to serve as blocking units.

The fate of the revolution was to be played in a small unknown railway station, at 70 versts from Kazan, on the Moscow line on the Volga : Sviajask. On August 8, 1918, the train of Trotsky fell, leaving for Kazan. Sviajask is the key to central Russia, the last stronghold on which Trotsky decided to hold at all costs. He is powerfully assisted by the commander-in-chief of the eastern front, Vatsetis. Before his arrival, Trotsky issued the following order :

25

The fight against the czech White Guards did not last long. Neglect and pusillanimity in our ranks are the best allies of our enemies. In the train of the war Commissioner, in which the order is written, there is a military revolutionary Tribunal, which has unlimited powers. Comrade Kamenchtchikov, whom I appointed as responsible for the defense of the Moscow-Kazan railway line, witnessed the creation of concentration camps at Mourom, Arzamas and Sviajask where dark agitators, counter-revolutionary officers, spoilers, parasites and speculators will be put under lock and key, with the exception of those who will be shot in the very theater of their crime or condemned by the courts to other punishments.20

Trotsky's attitude towards the cossacks of the Don goes even further, testifying to a true genocidal logic. At

the beginning of 1919, at the time of the soviet offensive on the Don, the cossack troops positioned in this northern part of the front had withdrawn, opening up to the Red Army the possibility of a decisive advance. The cossack office of the Bolshevik party and the staff of the South Front impose terror on the north of the Don. Trotsky approves in these terms :

In their own way, the Cossacks form a zoological species and nothing else. The old cossack genus must be burned in the flames of social revolution. Let the last remains, like the pigs of the Gospel, be thrown into the sh…21

The goal is to eliminate all the cossack elite and all those who in one way or another have fought against

soviet power, while "safe populations" are transferred from central Russia. One of the peculiarities of Trotsky's action during the Civil War was his understanding of the necessity of

resorting to military specialists to prevail on the ground. He was perfectly aware that in this field dilettantism and improvisation lead to failure. The most determined opposition to Trotsky's military policy came from Stalin and from the "Tsaritsyn group." Stalin opposes to the army of "specialists" an army of "partisans" to his devotion. Trotsky won by his determination to carry out a policy of framing the Red Army against the backdrop of the military, while the majority of the party wanted an "anti-militarist" army, commanded by former mutineers over any suspicion.

Trotsky acted as "great lord of war" and acquired a tool of rare effectiveness, which soon became a legendary symbol : the armored train. Thanks to this, Trotsky was everywhere, his armored train passing constantly from one front to another. On the strategic level, however, its role was more political than military. Besides his wife, Trotsky had no close friends. However, he had what Stalin would later call a "staff" that Dimitri Volkogonov is so presenting :

It was not the same as servants, but rather a terrified and silent socialist staff who, for the slave's privilege, for the possibility of being a being a little higher than the ordinary mortals, was willing to realize Every wish of the leader. Trotsky was one of those who laid the foundations of this innumerable and essential attribute of the bureaucratic Moloch.22

20 VOLKOGONOV, Trotski, p. 132. 21 JEVAKHOFF, op. cit., p. 521. 22 VOLKOGONOV, Trotski, p. 172.

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STALIN On the right flank of the eastern front, Tsaritsyne became a critical point in the course of 1918 due to

supply difficulties. The city is then completely encircled by the cossacks. It is on this strategic point that Stalin is sent by Lenin. On April 10, 1925, the city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad (before becoming, after the de-stalinization, Volgograd).

In the spring of 1919, the region of Petrograd was in a difficult situation. The forces of the counter-revolution, superior in number, are at the gates of Krasnoye Selo, of Gatchina. The command of the Red Army brings back strong units from other fronts around Petrograd. Stalin, who has an extraordinary envoy, is constantly either in the Petrograd Soviet or at the general staff of the defense Force. As always, his methods of work are dictatorial : the removal of those who do not complete their task, the trial of those whom he considers guilty of the situation created, the normalization of supplies, scolding of the governing bodies. For the defense of Petrograd, Stalin, like Trotsky, was decorated with the order of the Red Star. But, basically, on the military plane, his merits are more than modest. As early as 1918, he was considered a specialist in repressive measures, "extraordinary measures". In politics, Stalin is sharp, coarse, intolerant. It is not enough for him to defend his point of view, he tries to humiliate at the same time his opponent.

Stalin's relations with Trotsky, his hierarchical superior, are tense. First of all, Stalin did not like Trotsky's assurance, his eloquence, his authority, his ability to "assert himself". As for Trotsky, he showed total contempt for Voroshilov (close to Stalin) and regarded him as a poor warlord and a champion of anti-professionalism in the army. On more than one occasion Trotsky and Stalin both appealed to Lenin's arbitration. But Lenin's efforts to reconcile them were in vain : the two men were too ambitious, capricious and vain, even if it is Stalin's insubordination which had sparked the conflict. Throughout the civil war, Stalin ignored the authority of Trotsky and addressed directly over his head to Lenin.

Charles Ridoux

Amfroipret, June 6, 2017