The impact of Lenin's dictatorship

Model answer

At X the Czech Legion, about 40,000 former prisoners of war travelling east along the Trans-Siberian Railway, revolted in May 1918 after the Bolsheviks tried to disarm them, and seized towns along the railway. This helped start the Civil War because it gave the Bolsheviks' opponents a strong armed force, allowing anti-Bolshevik governments such as the SR government at Samara to be set up.

Model answer

The interpretations differ mainly because of when they were written and the political situation in the Soviet Union at the time. The author of Interpretation A was a political commissar who had served in the Red Army, so he had seen Trotsky's armoured train and its effect on the soldiers for himself. He was writing in 1923, when Trotsky was still Commissar for War and celebrated as the organiser of victory in the Civil War, so it was natural - and safe - to praise him in a book published in Moscow.

Interpretation B was a school history book published in Moscow in 1948, at the height of Stalin's dictatorship. By then Trotsky had lost the power struggle, had been expelled from the party and the USSR, and had been murdered in Mexico in 1940 on Stalin's orders. Soviet history was rewritten to glorify Stalin and blame Trotsky, which explains why B exaggerates Stalin's role at Tsaritsyn and claims Trotsky 'disrupted the work of the army'. As a school book, its purpose was to teach children the official version.

Model answer

Interpretation A argues that propaganda helped give the Reds 'the soldiers and the support they needed'. This is convincing in several ways. Most peasants could not read, so the Bolsheviks used posters with simple images, such as Dmitry Moor's 'Have You Volunteered?' and Viktor Deni's caricatures of capitalists and White generals. Agit-trains and agit-ships carried films, speakers and printing presses to the front and the villages, and commissars spread the message inside the Red Army. Above all, the message that a White victory would bring back the landlords matched peasants' real fears, because many White officers were landowners. By contrast, the Whites made little effort to explain their aims. A is also careful not to overstate its case, saying propaganda 'did not win battles by itself'.

Interpretation B argues that the power of propaganda is easily exaggerated. This is also convincing. Russia was vast, and posters and trains reached only part of it. Under War Communism, armed squads seized grain from the villages and the Red Army conscripted peasants, which led to peasant revolts, such as the Greens, and to very high desertion. The Cheka and the Red Terror kept control through fear. B is right that many peasants supported the Reds only as the lesser evil.

Overall, A is more convincing, although B is a useful warning. Propaganda could not make peasants love the Bolsheviks while their grain was being seized, but the decisive choice for most peasants was between the Reds and a White victory that threatened their land. Propaganda made sure that peasants understood that choice, which is why it mattered more than B allows.

Model answer

The Reds' control of central Russia, shown by the large area around Moscow and Petrograd in Figure 1, was a major reason for their victory. This was the most densely populated part of the country, so the Reds had far more people to conscript; the Red Army grew to about 5 million by 1920. The centre also contained most of Russia's remaining industry and arms factories, which could supply the army. Most importantly, Moscow was the hub of the railway network. Using these interior lines, the Reds could move troops and supplies quickly from one front to another, and Trotsky's armoured train could reach a crisis within days. The Whites, by contrast, held the thinly populated edges of Russia, with poor communications and little industry.

The Whites' failure to co-ordinate their attacks was also crucial. As Figure 1 shows, the White armies attacked from three directions, but not at the same time. Kolchak advanced from Siberia towards the Volga in the spring of 1919, but he had been driven back before Denikin's army advanced from the south to Orel in October 1919, and Yudenich reached the outskirts of Petrograd in the same month. The White leaders were thousands of kilometres apart, with poor communications, and they were rivals with different aims. This allowed the Reds to concentrate their forces against each White army in turn: Kolchak first, then Denikin and Yudenich, and finally Wrangel in 1920.

Overall, the Reds' control of central Russia was the more important reason, but the two factors were closely linked. Even if the Whites had co-ordinated their attacks, the Reds would still have had more men, more industry and the railways. Control of the centre was a permanent advantage, whereas the Whites' failure to co-ordinate was partly a result of geography: armies on the edges of a vast country, separated by Red territory, found it almost impossible to work together. The Whites' disunity made the Reds' task easier, but it was the Reds' central position that turned that disunity into defeat.