Click here to view the 73 documents in the Stalin and the Civil War Project.

Partial inspiration for this project comes from an event that took place in June of 1933, when the Society of Old Bolsheviks made a decision to organize at their club an exhibition in honor of Stalin’s accomplishments during the Civil War. After formally requesting a number of photographs and archival documents from the Central Archival Administration, archival administrators wrote directly to Stalin for his permission to release the materials. In his distinctive blue pencil, Stalin responded, “I am against it, because similar undertakings are leading to a reinforcement of a ‘cult of personality’ that is harmful and incompatible with the course of our Party” (see f. 558, op. 1, d. 4572 in this collection to examine the entire exchange). Stalin’s blunt rejection reflected, at least on the surface, the belief that heroism and devotion to the cause of socialism did not emanate from a single individual, but rather from the people themselves. Despite such rhetoric, however, it became apparent that a personality cult centered on the exploits of Stalin as an infallible father figure had coalesced in the popular consciousness by 1929. By the late 1930s, Stalin emerged as the most visible figure in the state-sanctioned narrative of the Russian Civil War. The following collection of documents provides a deeper understanding of Stalin’s actual involvement during the Civil War, and reveals his personal hand in directing the construction of a sanitized history of the conflict that emerged during the 1930s.

An assessment of the documents in Stalin’s personal archives reveals a wealth of information about the internal workings of the Bolshevik Party and the Red Army at key junctures of the Civil War. The war experience acted as a baptism of fire for the fledgling socialist state, and the siege mentality that embodied the Bolsheviks’ struggle for survival played an instrumental role in shaping the psychology of Soviet officials in the years immediately following the conflict. After the Bolsheviks had seized power, former tsarist generals and ranking officers of the old Provisional Government gathered in southern Russia to put together an anti-Bolshevik army. The capitalist Western powers initially aided this White Army in the hopes that a Red defeat would guarantee Russia’s reentry into the First World War. Once the Great War came to an end, the governments of France, Britain, and the United States all contributed troops to Russia in an attempt to defeat communism and restore some semblance of democracy. The Bolsheviks formed the Red Army from workers, peasants, and soldiers disillusioned with the old regime. Although they benefited from the leadership of former tsarist officers like Sergei Kamenev, many of their most talented commanders, such as Mikhail Frunze and Semen Budennyi, came from the ranks of the proletariat.

The White Armies concentrated on three major fronts: in the South in the Don and Volga regions, in the North around Arkhangelsk, and in Western Siberia. From 1918-1920, the Whites and interventionist forces pressed their attacks against the Bolshevik centers of Petrograd and Moscow. During the most ferocious stages of the conflict, both sides executed war prisoners and killed peasants who refused to turn their grain and livestock over to their respective armies. The use of terror in the countryside stimulated unrest and mutual hatred for both sides in the conflict. Over time, however, the Red Army managed to procure more support from the population, and the White armies were pushed farther from the center.

During the course of the war, counterrevolutionary forces began making inroads in the south. Under the command of General Anton Denikin, the White Armies began a massive push toward Moscow, and their forces laid siege to Tsaritsyn, a strategically valuable provincial city on the Volga River. Stalin and many of his contemporaries played major roles during this campaign, and several of the documents in this collection, particularly Stalin’s telegraphs to Lenin and other members of the leadership, illuminate the significant logistical challenges that Bolshevik forces faced on the ground (a majority of these documents concentrate specifically on the Southern Front).

Ultimately, through the material gains made by Red forces, in particular the actions of Semen Budennyi’s First Cavalry Army, Denikin’s initial gains evaporated, and the Red Army began to push the White Army out of its strongholds on the Don. The Whites’ foreign allies began withdrawing their own troops from Arkhangelsk and the Caucasus in the final months of 1919, leaving Denikin undersupplied and isolated. Admiral Kolchak’s eastern campaign similarly crumbled, and Kolchak himself was captured and executed in February 1920. Denikin resigned in disgrace, and although his successor, Baron Petr Wrangel, did his best to continue the struggle against the Bolsheviks, his forces were subsequently pushed back to the Crimean fortress of Perekop. The Red Army, under the command of Mikhail Frunze, unleashed a final assault on Perekop in November 1920, forcing Wrangel to flee Russia once and for all. With his defeat, the Civil War essentially came to an end.

In the years following the war, the Soviet leadership worked steadily to increase the historical literacy of the masses, devising a comprehensive narrative they hoped would be accessible to the broadest spectrum of the citizenry. In 1931 Stalin called for the establishment of a commission to oversee the writing of a substantial collection of works, the History of the Civil War in the USSR. This endeavor was engineered to chronicle every major event of the Civil War in all the territories of the Soviet Union. Under the management of Maksim Gor’kii, one of the most celebrated writers of the Soviet period, an ambitious campaign was launched to catalogue the exploits of commanders, commissars, and everyday Civil War veterans throughout the Soviet Union. As illustrated in a number of the documents in this collection, Maksim Gor’kii’s proposals intrigued Stalin, who saw the project as a way to instill pride and enthusiasm for the revolution in the youngest generation, and to broaden the Soviet population’s basic understanding of the period. Several documents in the collection illustrate the initial phases of this endeavor.

During the late 1930s, as the Terror consumed many of the Civil War’s heroes, Soviet publishers substituted institutional histories that sanitized events by avoiding reference to problematic figures. Such works elevated Stalin as the most important individual in the revolutionary narrative and the chief architect of the famous “Southern strategy” that pushed back the Whites in a vicious counterattack and ultimately won the war. In collected works of literature and poetry, Stalin increasingly took center stage, either as the all-wise father and engineer of victory during the Civil War, or as an epic hero who single-handedly defeated the White Armies in fierce combat. The writers bestowed upon Stalin an aura of infallibility that made him an almost divine figure. Stalin had a special seat of honor as an icon of leadership and heroism. Correspondence in this collection reveals the concerted effort on the part of officials to utilize archival documents in museum collections and historical expositions of the Civil War as a method of enshrining Stalin as the principal strategist and hero of the revolution.