The cause of the great rebellions of peasants and workers against Koltschak was his reactionary behavior. Sverdlov, who was in technical charge of the transportation expedition of the Red Army operating against Koltschak, related that terrible epidemics harrowed Koltschak's troops. Over 80% of them were sick from typhus. The epidemic spread to the people. At Novo Nicolajevsk 10,000 bodies were found. Between Omsk and Nicolajevsk 15,000 graves were found with crosses. All were victims of typhus. Koltschak himself lived in the midst of these terrors without caring what happened around him. He had a special train with music and women and led a fast life. His generals shot the revolutionary workers of the factories wherever they could get hold of them. In Tomsk all the factory committees were put in jail. Every one suspected of being a bolshevik or of some other revolutionary color was subjected to a Spanish torture and finally shot. In the year of 1919 Koltschak sent a trainload of dead from Asia to Europe.
In view of such conduct it is easy to understand that the peasants and workers would rise against Koltschak and fight him. It was, in the first place, the peasants and workers rebelling against this ghastly rule who annihilated Koltschak, and not the Red Army. All that the Red Army had to do, according to Sverdlov's report, was to relieve the peasants and the workers, who, together with the revolting elements of Koltschaks' army, had already conquered the Koltschak officers. Even here it was the federalistically aggregated bands of peasants and workers who performed the greatest work in combatting reaction and not the centralistically organized Red Army, formed through compulsory mobilization.
And even the liberation of Petrograd from the armies of Judenitsch is more the merit of the Petrograd workers, who in the hour of danger went, all united, against the threatening army. As commander of Petrograd, Bill Shatoff, a Russian-American I. W. W. and an anarchist, w,as elected and in the hour of highest danger the workers put Judenitsch to flight, after he had already penetrated into the streets of the Petrograd suburbs.
Moved by all these instances, all revolutionary socialist tendencies in Russia who oppose centralism and in centralism see a reactionary element are against the idea of ,a Red Army. They declare that the Red Army is not a revolutionary but a counterrevolutionary factor, because, with its system of centralism, the obedience of unfree subjects is again introduced into the ranks of revolutionaries and freedom is suppressed. But they are by no means opponents of the armed uprisings of the people. They point to the fact that they always stood in the first ranks of the revolutionary fighters and stand there still, and when the bolsheviks say the armed uprising of the revolutionary people and the Red Army with its compulsory mobilization, are the same they declare this to be a conscious falsehood.
The defeats that the Red Army suffered in Poland gave birth to grave conflicts within the Communist Party itself. At the beginning of the war against Poland I just arrived in Moscow as the first big army show, a parade on Theatralnaja Square, took place. The next day, May 6, 1920, Karl Radek explained to me how greatly important the taking up of General Brussilov was for the Red Army. "When Lloyd George reads about that," Radek said to me, "he, and with him all English government politicians, will say to themselves, that the bolsheviks cannot be so bad, after all, when a man like Brussilov can work
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
The bolsheviks themselves now see the untenable situation in the Red Army and gave expression to this fact at their party conference in Moscow in October 1920. Zinoviev said: