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181 5 Between Red and white a s 1918 drew to a close, the stark choice between the Bolsheviks and the Kolchak government returned the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) to the dilemmas they had faced in the first months of the year. No less than in early 1918, the SRs believed that Bolshevik rule spelled doom for the revolution, whose salvation depended on the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks were clearly not going to resuscitate the Assembly, however, and the effort to fight for it had proved a dismal failure. To many SRs, the history of the Eastern front seemed to corroborate the analysis of the Central Committee theses of January 1918, which had stressed that armed struggle on behalf of the Constituent Assembly would only intensify the civil war and play into the hands of counterrevolution. The SR leadership had always worried that reactionary generals would emerge from such carnage victorious. The fears that had gripped the party in the first months after October—counterrevolution and Bonapartist dictatorship, identified now with Admiral Kolchak in Siberia and General Anton Denikin in the south—thus reasserted their hold. The catastrophe in the east was not the only reason those fears reemerged so powerfully: the abrupt end of World War I after the November Revolution in Germany was equally important. An understanding of the civil war as a part of the larger World War had been central to SR thinking about the civil war since early 1918. All the while, it had coexisted uneasily with a conception of the civil smith_text_3.indd 181 2/21/11 2:40 PM 182 / Between Red and white war as an extension of the revolutionary cataclysms of 1917. Brest-Litovsk had laid the foundations for SR participation on the anti-Bolshevik side of the civil war by overturning the relations between these two competing conceptions of the civil war. Over the course of the summer and fall of 1918, the SRs’ Eastern front faced German imperialism as much, or more, than it did Bolshevik power. For SRs the end of the World War therefore called into question the meaning of the Eastern front and of the civil war itself. Rethinking the Civil war Considerations along these lines became the subject of an unofficial meeting of the Central Committee with leaders of the Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly in Ekaterinburg in mid-November, shortly after the end of the World War but before the coup in Omsk. Although the meeting took no formal resolutions, the participants agreed that the German Revolution and the Bolshevik annulment of Brest-Litovsk had transformed the events in Russia into what they termed a “normal civil war.” It was no longer possible to represent the civil war as a part of the larger World War. The Eastern front now faced only the Soviet state, not German imperialism, and Allied aid had metamorphosed into Allied intervention. In such a “normal civil war,” the participants in the meeting agreed, what chances for victory the democracy possessed depended on revolutionary unity in the face of counterrevolution. The lexical shift from Allied aid to Allied intervention and the renewed centrality of the conceptual opposition between the revolutionary democracy and the counterrevolution reflected a return to thinking about the civil war in terms of revolution and class. As the SR leadership understood it, in a normal civil war the combatants represented class interests, as they did in a revolution: the forces to the SRs’ right were defending the interests of the expropriated landowners and bourgeoisie , and the democracy was fighting for the mass of laboring people, with the Bolsheviks representing the “maximalistically-inclined minority of the working class.”1 Having begun to rethink the civil war, the participants in the meeting agreed to begin considering the terms for a reconciliation with the Soviet government. Chernov sent a courier to the SR underground in Moscow to sound out the possibilities for an SR-Bolshevik agreement.2 The changing SR understanding of the civil war and the resurgence of the language of class in party discourse had little practical impact prior to the Omsk coup, but the view that Russia now faced a normal civil war spread quickly through the party after November 18. Few SRs had any doubt about the party’s place in such a civil war: it was with the revolutionary democracy and against the Whites. On December 5 a joint meeting of the available members of the Central Committee, the Presidium and...

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