Still Searching for the ‘Third Way’: Geoffrey Swain’s Interventions in the Russian Civil Wars

Abstract

This essay offers a critical analysis of the contributions to the history of the Russian Civil Wars made by one of its most prolific and controversial historians, Geoffrey Swain, setting his monographs, articles, chapters, book reviews and other writings on the subject into broader developments in the field. The author finds that Swain’s interventions in debates on the civil wars have cut against the grain in many respects, but that Swain’s case for the potentiality of an alternative outcome to the Civil-War struggles—a ‘Third Way’, one that was neither Red nor White but ‘Green’—remains, so far, not proven.

Notes

¹ To find precursors to these volumes one would have to reach back to the 1960s and 1970s and even to the 1930s, and even then only to find works as much, if not more, interested in the Allied intervention in Russia as they were in Russian events per se (Stewart 1933; Footman 1961; Bradley 1975). And these works could be hard to find: having failed to locate a copy of the best of them (Stewart) in the UK in the 1980s, whilst researching a PhD on the White movement, I finally located a copy (but one not available for consultation) in 1991, on an out-of-reach bookshelf in Trotsky’s office in Coyoacan, Mexico!

² For further historiographical and bibliographical information, see also Marot (1994), Smele (2001, 2003), Wade (2008).

³ For detailed background on persons, parties and institutions mentioned in this essay, see the entries in Smele (2015).

⁴ Swain, although he often substituted the term ‘the Third Way’, seems not to have been criticised for perpetuating and granting credibility to the term ‘democratic counter-revolution’ to the acts of those who regarded the Bolshevik ‘coup’ of October 1917 and subsequent dispersal of the Constituent Assembly as counter-revolutionary (in that Lenin’s party had toppled both the revolutionary Provisional Government—however compromised it had become—and its legitimate successor) and their own actions as profoundly democratic. There is traction in such a criticism—the term was, after all, coined by the Soviet government’s pet Menshevik, Ivan Maiskii, in his first-hand account of the period (Maiskii 1923). However, as long as its warped genesis is understood the usage remains more aesthetically pleasing and easier understood than its logical alternative, the ‘democratic counter-counter-revolution’. Swain’s use of the term ‘Greens’ to describe his subjects is, however, more problematic (on which, see below).

⁵ On recent scholarship, see Read (1997). One veteran scholar’s return to the fray of 1918 focused more on urban affairs, workers and workers’ parties in the Soviet zone than on the (PSR) and the (PPR) and their interaction with peasants around Russia’s periphery (Rabinowitch 1999a, 1999b).

⁶ The reference is to Radkey (1976).

⁷ Consequently, Swain had earlier claimed that the date of the closure of the Vikzhel talks, on 4 November 1917, was ‘in many ways a date more crucial than 25 October’ (Swain 1991b, p. 294).

⁸ Swain (1991a) was, for example, severely critical of works that tended to use all sorts of ‘fantastic deductions’ to inflate figures pertaining to the victims of the Cheka.

⁹ Interestingly, Swain did not go as far as to suggest, as another historian recently had (Melograni 1989), that Lenin’s actions were designed to ensure the Bolsheviks’ hegemony, as custodians of the first socialist state, over the European labour movement in general.

¹⁰ It explains also Swain’s reading of James D. White’s biography of Lenin (White 2001), which he praised for its coverage of Lenin’s youth and for revealing how Russian Marxists got Marx so wrong regarding the Russian peasantry, but criticised for abandoning the task of explaining Lenin in power, as both the subject and the author of the book came to the end of their ‘personal road to Calvary’, as Lenin’s distorted brand of Marxism proved unworkable in Russia (Swain 2001, p. 1132).

¹¹ In line with the motto that Lenin would later ascribe (perhaps mistakenly) to Napoleon: ‘On s’engage et puis … on voit’ (Lenin 1965, p. 479).

¹² On which see Jansen (1986).

¹³ Even prior to the Kolchak coup, similar events at Arkhangel’sk put paid to the PSR–PS Supreme Administration and drove Chaikovskii into exile (Novikova 2008, 2011, pp. 83–127).

¹⁴ They had wanted the ailing General Alekseev, who died that October, to occupy the set on the Directory reserved for a military man.

¹⁵ Interestingly, with regard to the potential for Allied support for the ‘patriotic socialists’, in September–November 1918 Kerensky himself was attempting but failing to secure a visa to pass through the United States on his way to Siberia to offer support to the Directory, having been roundly shunned by the governments in London and Paris upon his flight from Bolshevik Russia (Smele 2007). So much for the Allies’ devotion to the ‘Third Way’: indeed, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, with the Royal Navy’s capture of the ‘Red Admiral’ F. F. Raskol’nikov on 26 December 1918, Prime Minister Lloyd George was initiating negotiations towards a prisoner exchange that presaged a coming to terms with Moscow—a process in which all former Allied associations with Swain’s ‘patriotic socialists’ came hastily to be regarded as an embarrassing encumbrance (Smele 2006).

¹⁶ Because their attacks were chiefly focused not on the civil wars but on Swain’s treatment of Trotsky’s Marxism and his clashes with Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s. Swain dismissed another effort from this tendency (Le Blanc 2015), as ‘not a serious academic study, but a primer for the faithful’ (Swain 2016a, p. 361).

¹⁷ Thatcher devoted just five pages to the Civil War, while Service provided 30.

¹⁸ And, to a slightly lesser extent, in his subsequent condensing of it for students (Swain 2014), which does not require separate discussion here.

¹⁹ That said, one of the chief contributions of another work with which Swain was involved (Butt et al. 1996) was a selection of documents relating to events in the Far East of 1920–1922.

²⁰ Although he neglects to mention that the Allied aid that Gajda and his associates were anticipating was a pipe dream—one peddled by a renegade British diplomat, O’Reilly, who was swiftly disowned by his masters in London (Smele 1996, pp. 557–64).

²¹ And after Moscow had secured peace treaties with Finland, the Baltic states and Poland (solidifying its hold on Ukraine), treaties of friendship with Kemelist Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, and a trade agreement with Japan’s ally, Britain, as well as absorbing Transcaucasia and most of Central Asia into the Soviet sphere.

²² F. K. Mironov, former Inspector of Cavalry of the Red Army, was executed in the Butyrki prison, Moscow, on 2 April 1921, having been found guilty of some very flimsy charges of preparation of a counter-revolutionary uprising on the Don.

²³ Eric Landis (Landis 2010, p. 32, fn. 8) archly noted that many historians interested in the phenomenon have had their books published in green cloth covers, but we cannot accuse Geoffrey Swain of that.

²⁴ For a fuller version, see Osipova (1996b).

²⁵ Much more frequently, the demand of the Bolsheviks’ opponents at this juncture was for ‘Soviets without Communists’, hence the title of a one notable work on the phenomenon (Shishkin 2000).

²⁶ Landis rightly traces this back to the broad-brush use of the term in the early émigré writings of the Russian socialist opposition, ‘as they reported on the continued armed rebellion against the Soviet state in 1921 in a manner consistent with pre-1917 idealised conceptions of the narod’ (Landis 2010, p. 32). He cites materials in Brovkin (1991) to substantiate this.