Interlude: Every Fascism is the Index of a Failed Revolution

Interlude: Every Fascism is the Index of a Failed Revolution

Spartakusaufstand

In the winter of 1918/19, Germany is a failed state. The armistice signed in the fall set the falling dominoes into motion, and the Reich crumbled around it. German sailors mutinied in Kiel against suicidal orders for the fleet to die with honor rather than be interred, and by late October most of the country had seen the towns and cities play host to “Workers’ and Soldiers Councils” joining in solidarity with the Kiel sailors.

In spite of nominative similarities to the “workers’ and soldiers’ soviets” of the Russian Revolution, these organs are instruments of a liberal democratic revolution, not a communist one. Not yet, at least. The councils did not interfere with the normal civil administrations, nor did they direct factory occupations or the seizure of property except on limited levels. Their agenda is primarily peace, anti-militarism, and democracy, and to that end the councils enforce the abdication of the entirety of Germany’s monarchs, from the kings down to the grand dukes. The Russian Revolution had started no less innocently, and figures in the establishment Social Democrats, the imperial bureaucracy and the remnants of the Imperial Heer would be brought into conspiracy to arrest the brewing social revolution.

On 25 November 1918, with the future of the monarchy and the German Reich still in limbo, the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League) promulgated its revolutionary demands, inspired by the Bolsheviks: direct control of production by the workers’ councils and factory committees, expropriation of the landlords, abolition of the secret police and other instruments of repression, and the establishment of democratic socialist state. That afternoon, Karl Liebknecht declared the formation of a “Free Socialist Republic” to crowds outside the Reichstag.

The revolutionaries had seized the initiative from Friedrich Ebert and the Majority Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands(Social Democratic Party of Germany), whose own declaration of a republic had been pre-empted. The working masses of Berlin began occupying the factories and the buildings of the imperial government. The Berlin sections of the Prussian Police are quickly swept aside by the workers’ and soldiers councils’ own Red Guards.

By nightfall of the 26th, the city streets are largely in the hands of the workers. Believing this to be the hour of triumph, the Berlin council of people’s deputies admits representatives of the majority SPD, alongside the Spartakusbund and Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) that had been the backbone of this revolution.

Ebert, however, denounces the councils as a lawless revolution, though his own republic is from the standpoint of Imperial law an equally lawless revolution. But the Kaiser is gone, and Ebert is what is left, his hopes of a constitutional monarchy now ashes. The dual power situation sits uneasily over the city of Berlin, with neither side making maneuvers. To the Entente, Ebert’s government is Germany, and remnants of the Reich are grudgingly at his disposal. 12 December’s formation of the Kommunistische Partie Deutschlands(Communist Party of Germany) ups the ante. With the KPD mobilizing, and absorbing more of the membership of the USPD with each passing day, and the reactionaries continuing with their thinly veiled threats, Ebert must make a decision: reaction or revolution.

Ebert begins his first overtures by firing the USPD’s Emil Eichorn, the Berlin police chief who refused to the order to fire on striking workers during the days of red in November, and replacing him with a toadie of the army. On 4 January, the workers take to the streets in Berlin in protest, effectively shutting down the city. The KPD led Revolution Committee’s overtures to the military units stationed in the city bear fruit when the crack Volksmarinedivision agrees to take the side of the KPD/USPD alliance. With the other units at least for now neutral, the situation develops in the favor of the revolutionists. The Red Guards are now bolstered by a disciplined navy detachment, but the guns are still silent.

Berlin is not alone in social revolution. It is however, geographically isolated. And while the revolutionists nominally control the largest concentration of urban workers and industry in Germany, the city is surrounded by the deeply reactionary Prussian hinterland, with few available allies. Other risings elsewhere are might as well be on the moon.

On 7 January, the Majority SPD and Ebert quit Berlin for Potsdam, the “second capital” and former residence of the Kaiser, as well as the seat of much of the Imperial bureaucracy. Out of the direct line of fire, and still in nominal control of the German Reich, Ebert begins mobilising paramilitary units, the infamous Freikorps (Free Corps). While he might be paying these volunteers, the officers and men are handpicked from the cream of the crop of the German military’s reactionaries, and are only slightly less hostile to the republic and the SPD compared to the KPD.

On 9 February, the Revolutionary Committee splits when the USPD invites Ebert for talks. The KPD aligned-committee begins mobilizing a Red Army from volunteers, while the the USPD committee hopes to strike a compromise with Ebert. Sporadic streetfighting breaks out in Berlin, as the Red Army clashes with Freikorps infiltrators and recruiters. Ebert denies knowledge of these efforts, and continues to play for time. The Battle of Berlin proper commences on 18 February, as Freikorps Pabst began its assault on the city with almost six thousand men. Stiffened by the Berlin police and other units loyal to the government, they outnumbered the trained fighting men of the Red Army 2:1. Coupled with the Freikorps access to machine guns and light artillery, and the disorganized state of the Berlin revolutionaries, this resulted in a rout.

The city is largely retaken in two days time. Many of the local leaders of the KPD and USPD are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps , including Liebknecht.

Bayerische Räterepublik

While the much beleaguered establishment was preoccupied with the Greater Poland Uprising in the east, or the situation in Berlin, revolution was brewing within Bavaria. Workers in Munich took to the streets with the announcement of the armistice. Demanding justice for the martyred anti-war leader Kurt Eisner, a crowd 100,000 strong marched on the Residenz Palace. Abandoned by the army, King Ludwig III made an announcement releasing civil servants and police from their oaths.
Ernst Toller, a decorated veteran of the German Army, declared the formation of the Bayerische Räterepublik(Bavarian Council Republic) on 12 November 1918. Under Toller’s leadership, the nascent KPD/USPD coalition would brook no half-measures. The war had emaciated the workers in the towns and cities, and the demands of the war economy had left by the economy of rural Bavara in shambles by 1918. Organizing soldiers and factory workers into a Bavarian Red Army, Toller struck quickly at centers of reaction, imprisoning “class-enemies” ruthlessly.

In the “liberal period” of November to January, Toller’s government focused its efforts on land reform, agricultural relief and bringing basic services back into order. Getting struggling smallholders on the side of the new government is paramount if the cities are to survive, as the BRA fights a hundred small battles over the control of the towns and cities.

Fundamentally, the fight against reactionaries in this period meant the revolutionaries were playing at liberalism. Toller’s government invited members of the Bavarian section of Zentrum , and the Bayerischer Bauernbund (Bavarian Peasant’s League) into positions. Toller played the part of the liberal playwright well.
But Toller had been hardened and embittered by years spent at war. In the private councils of the KPD, he confided his frustration with cooperating with small minded burghers and land-hungry peasants. But they needed to bide time, either for favorable events in Berlin or for the KPD’s plans for a rising in the Ruhr to bear fruit.

When news reached Munich of Ebert’s thermidor in Berlin, Toller put aside such niceties. He publicly condemned Ebert as a traitor, and charged him of conspiring to return the monarchy and military-aristocracy to power. A wave of arrests followed, charging leading members of Zentrum and the Majority SPD of conspiring with the military to suppress the republic, introduce martial law, and restart the war. Certainly exaggerated, but contained enough of a kernel of truth.
The KPD rallied nationalists by condemning the Versailles Diktat , which its propaganda charged would leave the country in hock to foreign capitalists; the only solution was social revolution. Zentrum ‘s participation in Ebert’s government, leaked drafts of the treaty, and communiques expressing an intent to sign it, were used as pretext to suppress the party as traitors. By late February, the KPD seemed triumphant.

Ebert’s government was busily organizing Freikorps suppress the Bavarian revolutionaries. But with the return of soldiers from interventions in Poland and Lithuania, the Friekorps turned against the SPD. Incensed by the looming Diktat and the incompetence of the liberal parties in fighting the revolution, on 18 March 1919 Generalleutnant Walther von Lüttwitz begins attempts to overthrow the fledgling Weimar Republic, taking control of the Berlin, and installing Wolfgang Kapp as Chancellor.

Ebert’s cabinet quits to Weimar, Freikorps on its heels, and in front of the convened National Assembly calls a general strike in opposition. In Bavaria, Toller shifts priorities: in a speech before the Munich-based Rätekongress , he declared “After Kapp, then Ebert.” Emergency measures to safeguard the revolution are enacted, intensifying the pace of agricultural collectivization and industrial mobilization.

With the Ruhraufstand dizzy with success, it seems like social revolution is in sight. In the East, the Russian Red Army is driving to the western frontier, the next stop: Poland. But the first setbacks come in late March, when the French Army extends its occupation to the Bavarian Palatinate exclave, breaking the KPD’s tenuous hold. With the looming threat of a cancelled armistice, the German civil service refuses to support Kapp.

On 1 April 1919, the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch ends. Ebert’s period of playing nice with the Ruhr Red Army and Bavaria is over. Forces of the provisional Reichsheer arrest only the most notable of conspirators from the Putsch, and then turn their sites on Bavaria and the Ruhr.

In the opening battles on 6 April, the Bavarian Red Army defeats the initial thrusts led by Generalmajor Ludwig Maercker. But the Red Army is outmatched, and in subsequent engagements the better equipped and supported Reichsheer and Freikorps gain the upper hand.

On 7 May 1919, with defeat imminent, the KPD evacuates Munich. Its partisans and soldiers go underground to evade repression. Toller and others on the Central Committee negotiate surrender, accepting responsibility. Unfortunately, the advancing Freikorps renege on the surrender agreement, beginning a bloody scourging across the cities, towns and countryside of Bavaria.

Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság

The Party of Communists in Hungary had been founded in a Moscow hotel in October 1918 by former Hungarian prisoners of war. Amidst the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new party grew rapidly among disaffected Social Democrats, former soldiers and the unemployed, gaining nearly fifty thousand members in mere months.

The party was so named as a deliberate rejection of ethnic nationalism. The existence of the post-imperial national states like the People’s Republic of Hungary was a reality that was to be accepted, but the very nature of the empire meant that none of these new states were remotely ethnically or linguistically homogeneous, and nowhere was this more true than the urban working class.

Amidst the ongoing crisis in Hungary, the rapidly growing Communist Party developed strong ties with the Hungarian Social Democrats, against the wishes of the latter’s titular leader and president of the fledgling republic, Mihály Károlyi. Co-operating with Social Democratic wishes for a unified party of the the working class, the Communists accepted invitation into government. As the Social Democrats continued to bleed members to the Communists amidst a country rocked by high inflation, bread riots and unemployment, seizure of power was a forgone conclusion

Béla Kun, ostensibly the new foreign minister, would be the real center of the new revolution through his direct acquaintance to Vladimir Lenin. Following the example in Bavaria, the Social Democrat/Communist coalition arrested Károlyi, and declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic on 27 March 1919.
The new revolutionary government abolished all aristocratic privileges and the special status of Catholic Church. Freedom of speech and religion were guaranteed. Industry and commercial holdings were nationalized. Housing and social services were brought under social control by the workers’ councils. Large agricultural holdings were to be collectivized under social direction.

Simultaneously, the party began efforts to quell internal dissent. Balancing the desires of nationalists with the directives of the communist movement meant promising a restoration of Hungary’s borders. This tactical concession was necessary to maintain the Hungarian Red Army as a cohesive fighting force. Similarly, resistance in the countryside from both remnants of the nobility and their attendants, as well as the peasantry frustrated the basic provisioning of services in the cities.

Harsh crackdowns and purges of “reactionaries” from the government began early in April. But the Russian Red Army was driving west, against the Byelorussian People’s Republic and its Polish allies. Help would be coming soon, and to buy the necessary time, Kun’s government directed the Hungarian Red Army into invading the fledgling Republic of Czechoslovakia to re-establish Hungary’s pre-great war borders.

The initial battles ended in triumph for the Red Army. Slovakian communists welcomed the march of the Red Army. But Kun was in the impossible position of placating nationalists as well as the international workers’ movement. With Lenin’s approval, Kun attempted to split the difference to bide for time, establishing the Slovak Autonomous Soviet on 18 June 1919 as special zone in the HSR.

As the victorious Entente began to intensify pressure on the HSR, internal dissension within the Red Army began to fester. Slovak workers were not highly enthusiastic about the Autonomous Soviet, with many seeing it as a new coat of paint on “Upper Hungary”. Communists questioned whether this violated the principles of proletarian internationalism. And Hungarian left-nationalists chafed at concessions to minority groups.

As the Czechoslovak military rallied, and the neighboring Kingdom of Rumania mobilized for intervention, Kun continued to argue that Russian aid was mere weeks away. At its high-tide, the HSR had nearly succeeded in controlling all of the former territory of the Kingdom of Hungary by September 1919, following a lightning campaign of spoiling and exploitation attacks against Rumanian forces.

But with Hungary isolated, and both Czechoslovakia and Rumania being supported by Entente arms and credit, these initial gains were ephemeral. The overstretched Red Army began to die by inches. During a lull in fighting just before Christmas, Chief of the General Staff Aurél Stromfeld resigned, and the Red Army began to disintegrate.

On 18 January 1920, the Politburo of the KMP voted to abandon the struggle as hopeless. Partisans were either to go underground and prepare for continued agitation until such time as the political winds shifted, or to go into exile. In the wake of the disintegrating Soviet Republic, a campaign of White Terror followed as the Rumanian Army filled the vacuum, cooperating with the resurgent remnants of Miklós Horthy’s “National Army”, which had nearly been snuffed out by the Red Army’s fall offensives.

As would so often be the case in the 20th century, anti-communist nationalism became the fig-leaf for pogroms against Jews, other minorities, intellectuals, and trade unionists. The Kingdom of Hungary was proclaimed restored following the fall of Budapest on 30 May 1920. But all attempts to restore Charles IV as Apostolic King of Hungary were thwarted by the Entente, leaving the state under the regency of Horthy.

Horthy, the admiral without a navy, leader of a landlocked state, a kingdom without a king, had won a bitter victory. In spite of his moment of triumph the country would remain deeply divided internally, with some of the very same nationalists who deserted the Soviet Republic becoming latterday champions after Horthy acceded to the Treaty of Trianon, which restored peace but left the country with dominion over a primarily poor, rural agricultural state still ravaged by years of war and civil war.

Biennio Rosso in Italy

No country would be harmed by victory in the Great War as the Kingdom of Italy had been. When the disastrously costly war effort came to an end and the Royal Italian Army began demobilisation, the already ailing Italian economy was thrown into crisis. Italy had won the war but lost the peace. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was vanquished, but the territorial concessions Italy gained from its death were a pittance compared to the treasure sunk and blood spilled in the war.

The population was hit by a triple threat of high unemployment, high inflation (especially in basic goods), and stagnating wages. The Partido Socialista Italiano exploded in membership, as did many anarchist groups. Workers banded together for protection, forming factory councils to direct the struggle for living conditions that went beyond the narrow limits of the trade union’s demands.

The industrial cities of northern Italy were writhing with strikes in 1919, with more than one million workers in total taking part in nearly two thousand strike actions. Rural strikes by peasants followed in their wake. In their attempts to restore order, the Italian bourgeoisie would increasingly rely on right-wing nationalist militias, especially the Fasci Italiani da Combattimento(Italian Fasci of Combat), to break strikes.

These street battles intensified in April 1920, when Turin metalworkers, led by core cadres from Fiat, launched factory occupations in response to lockouts by management. The workers issued revolutionary demands for factory councils to serve as the basis for a new socialist system of production, and not merely a tool to barter concessions from management. These revolutionary demands by workers aligning towards the general line of the Communist International, were rejected by the PSI and the General Confederation of Labor. The Turin Red Army would clash with police and fascist Blackshirts throughout the spring and summer.

In the face of a Socialist Party unwilling to direct revolutionary action outside of the halls of parliament, the workers turned increasingly to methods of direct action. Unfortunately they were isolated by the PSI’s whiggery until the party split in January 1921. By the time the working class had a champion ready and willing to coordinate working class action against the Blackshirts, landlords and state violence, the high tide of revolutionary action had already passed.

The 8 May 1921 election occurred amidst the backdrop of increasing paramilitary violence and intimidation, resulting in a broad but totally ineffectual right-wing bloc winning a majority in parliament, including a significant number of deputies connected with the nascent Fascist movement.

Labor unrest continued, hampered by a divided political movement on the left, throughout 1921 and 22. The Fascists continued to gain support from right-wing military veterans, with crucial financial backing from Italian landlords and industrialists. The Blackshirts became the primary tool for breaking strikes and factory occupations.

Italy had stopped on the edge of revolution. And as the tide of working class strength receded, the Fascists grew ever bolder, culminating in a dramatic march on the capitol in Rome. Prime Minister Luigi Facta, of the Liberal Party, attempted to declare martial law and mobilize the army to crush Mussolini’s insurrection against the state, but this required the countersignature of King Vittorio Emanuele III. The king refused, instead appointing Mussolini as his prime minister, surrendering to fascist intimidation.

Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik

When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, they did so with the expressed purpose of providing the first spark in a globalized proletarian revolution. The newly formed Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic would provide the beachhead for working-class revolutionaries across Europe amidst the systemic crisis coming in the wake of the Great War.

The Bolshevik-inspired revolutions that gripped Central and Eastern Europe following the armistice meant this strategy appeared to be bearing fruit. Soviet Russia, however, was still in the midst of its own civil war. Risings in Bavaria, the Ruhr, and Hungary encouraged the beleaguered Red Army to knuckle down and bear the hardships it faced in the field, for all the revolution needed to do was survive.

Due to their central position controlling the major centers of industrial production and support from the working class, the Bolshevik/Left SR alliance held the position of strength against a divided White movement with no clear aims uniting it besides overthrowing the current polesitter. Lenin maintained this position through calculated use of terror, and iron discipline within the revolutionary government.

The “All Russian Extraordinary Commission”, commonly abbreviated as Cheka, wielded the sword of the Party for crushing reactionary dissent and enforcing discipline within the revolutionary movement. Led by the former Polish aristocrat turned communist Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka conducted the mass arrest of suspected “class enemies”. Officially, this meant agents of the former Imperial government, saboteurs, members of the Orthodox clergy, landlords and bourgeoisie, and defeatists within the party. In practice the wide latitude that Chekists operated with, the lack of formal procedures of due process, and the wartime chaos meant abuse of power was widespread.

During the crisis days following armistice on the Western front, when the Entente intensified its military intervention, this often meant the summary execution of suspected collaborators, dispensing with the required revolutionary tribunals. As incorruptible as “Iron Felix” had proven, he was one man in the bureaucratic machine, and the Cheka itself was filled with its own opportunists.

As the Red Army built disciplined cadres and turned the tide against the whites, the intensity of the Red Terror relaxed. Many of the former Imperials in the White Army proved to be loathsome allies to the Entente. Far from home, fighting a war with dubious aims against a movement with more noble pretenses than the likes of the Black Hundreds ensured that morale among Entente intervention forces was dismal. Mutiny and defection were rampant.

Following General Mikhail Frunze’s crushing of the Don Cossack host and the Ukrainian Hetmanate, the French fleet assisting the Whites and the Franco-American intervention force in the Crimea mutinied. The “Black Sea Mutiny” resulted in the seizure of two dreadnoughts, Jean Bart and France by their crews. Airing grievances about the immorality of the intervention, the slow state of demobilisation, and the atrocious quality of rations and poor health among the crews, the mutineers under the loose leadership of future SFIC prominents like André Marty, Charles Tillon and Alphonse Cannone also seized control of a number of other support ships.

While some among the strikers believed the best course was to defect to the Bolsheviks, most wished to avoid the resulting bloodshed of their countrymen. The French admiralty would accede to their immediate demands before the crew found any more time to fester, pardoning most of the crews and trying the ringleaders by courts-martial. But the Black Sea Mutiny did not end troubles for the intervention. Mutinies and surrenders among intervention forces intensified. Particularly for the French and American militaries, continued intervention became politically impossible. The abandonment crushed the morale of the White movement. The steady crawl towards victory by the Bolshevik governments of Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia would culminate in the Polish-Soviet War.

Reactionaries had defeated the various risings in Germany. But in August of 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was still in the fight, and Germany herself seemed to be a fragile house of cards. The Second Polish Republic, under Chief of State Jozef Piludski, had been in a de facto state of war with the Soviet alliance since its establishment. The new state had rapidly taken control of the machinery of state left behind by the dying Russian and German empires, and had taken up the dream of an Intermarium and now extended its influence into the Byelorussian and Ukrainian rump states on its borders.

Total war was inevitable. Following a wave of strikes against rationing and corruption in Warsaw, which had provoked a bloody crackdown and waves of additional sympathy strikes across the country, the Soviets began a major build up of forces adjacent to Polish-occupied Byelorussia and Ukraine. Piludski, sensing the danger, struck first on April 1920, issuing a declaration of war against Russia, and launching a major offensive towards Kiev, with the aim of liberating Ukraine from the Bolshevism.

The initial offensive broke through border troops. The Polish Third Army advanced quickly in the initial days, expecting to be greeted as liberators. But tales of Polish atrocities against “Russians”, scarcely being able to tell the difference between Ukrainians and Russians, galvanized support for the Bolshevik regime. Coupled with the former Tsarist General Brusilov’s appeal to support the Soviet regime, the Soviet forces rallied, and cut off the Polish spearheads east of Ukraine on 5 May 1920.
The ensuing Soviet counteroffensive dogged Polish forces as they retreated. But Tukhachevsky’s forces may now have outnumbered the Poles, they were hampered by the poor conditions of the spring rasputitsa. When the quagmires dried by early June, the Soviets resumed the counteroffensive, beginning to strike into Poland. Both sides were short of food, useable weapons, and ammunition, but the Polish forces manning formerly German fortifications were able to blunt Tukhachevsky’s spearheads. Additional forces under the command of Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin and Semyon Budyonny attempted to pile on in July to break the defense lines, to limited success.

The attack into Poland was slow going but methodical. But it raised a new spectre of renewed Entente intervention everyday. The once beleaguered Weimar Republic was stiffened by the encroaching threat to the east, as former reactionaries grudgingly accepted the present situation.

Soviet forces neared Warsaw by September 1920. But Polish counteroffensives on the Southern flank and Galica threatened to collapse the whole endeavor. Successful action by Stalin’s Lviv Front thwarted the immediate danger, but the whole situation remained overextended. The extension of military aid by the United Kingdom buoyed Polish morale. Strikes by dockworkers had been suppressed successfully, and the war surplus materiel gave enough teeth to the Polish Army to begin limited counteroffensives. The Red Army could not advance, and began to bleed itself white in Poland. In November 1920, while still occupying much of Polish territory, Lenin’s government made the first overtures for peace amidst growing fears of a resurgent White movement at home, and Rumanian intervention in Galicia.

The resulting Treaty of Riga set the Polish-Soviet Border at the eastern border of the Bialystok Voivodeship, continuing south bisecting the Polesie Voivodeship on the eastern borders of the Prużana and Kobryń Powiatys, bisecting the Kowel Powiaty at its narrowest point, and then continuing along the eastern borders of Horochów Powiaty and the Tarnopol Voivodeship.

Unconsciously, the Bolshevik government began the retreat away from proletarian internationalism. Devastated by the Great War, and the ensuing civil war, the battered states of the former Russian Empire settled accounts internally. Blaming dissension and defeatism from within, the Bolsheviks completed their absorption of the Left-SRs, imprisoning many of the dissenters from the forced merger. Simultaneously, Lenin loosened control of the economy, promulgating the New Economic Policy which returned private control of small enterprises, and ended the direct requisition of grain.

In March 1921, the Red soldiers and sailors of the Kronstadt fortress, near Petrograd, took strike action, protesting what the leaders saw as the abandonment of proletarian internationalism, the surrender to capitalist profiteering, and the miserable peace with Poland. Other demands included free elections to the soviets from among left socialist parties, free speech and assembly, worker commissions to supervise the end of forced prison labor, and fair trials for the accused,
Kronstadt had struck a chord with workers. In spite of official secrecy, sympathy actions were beginning to spread. Fearing disaster if the revolutionary movement were to be divided at this critical time, the Sovnarkom debated action. Dissidents to the Polish peace, such as Mikhail Frunze, wished to ensure a negotiated surrender by of the Kronstadt mutineers. Lenin and Trotsky favored a rapid suppression.

Suppression would ultimately be ordered on 14 March 1921. Loyal combat sections of the party, crack Red Army veterans whose loyalty could be assured, and military academy cadets formed the core of the 60,000 man force. The uprising was suppressed at bitter cost, and most of the leadership would be tried and executed by revolutionary tribunal.

The civil war would end in the coming years. By December 1922, the governments of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Byelorussian Socialist Soviet Republic, and the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic would federate into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, under the leadership of the merged All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). But the rot had already began to set in.