The Spy Who Changed History. Svetlana Lokhova

Adam to the Russian Anton.³⁹ On volunteering for the Red Army, indeed, Shumovsky concealed much about his privileged upbringing, telling the recruiters he was the son of a Ukrainian peasant worker who somehow spoke French and German.⁴⁰

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      The destruction and loss of life during the Russian Civil War was among the greatest catastrophes that Europe had seen. The conflict would rage with enormous bloodshed from November 1917 until October 1922. As many as 12 million died, mostly civilians who succumbed to disease and famine.⁴¹ It was a time of anarchy. The armed factions lived off the land, extracting supplies and recruiting ‘volunteers’ at gunpoint while fighting to determine Russia’s political future. The two largest combatant groups were the Red Army, fighting for the Bolshevik form of socialism, and the loosely allied forces known as the White Army. The divided White factions favoured a variety of causes, including a return to monarchism, capitalism and alternative forms of socialism. At the same time rival militant socialists, anarchists, nationalists, and even peasant armies fought against both the Communists and the Whites.

      Shumovsky and his unit were stationed in southern Russia, at the centre of the bloodiest fighting. In all the carnage and suffering he was one of many teenagers given positions of responsibility in the army. There was nothing in his genteel background to prepare Shumovsky for the terrors he faced on the battlefield. In August 1918, he made a long, daunting and arduous journey of several hundred miles on foot to join a determined band of Communist partisans under their charismatic leader Pyotr Ipatov, based far behind the main battle lines.⁴² On his arrival Shumovsky was given a red armband, a rifle and a cartridge belt. He was in action within two days. Ipatov’s band supported the village militia units raised by local councils to fend off marauding armed bands of foragers from the White ‘Volunteer’ armies sent out by Generals Kornilov, Alekseyev and Denikin.⁴³ The White leader, General Kornilov, ruled by fear. His slogan was ‘the greater the terror, the greater our victories’. In the face of the peasant resistance he was sticking to his vow to ‘set fire to half the country and shed the blood of three-quarters of all Russians’.⁴⁴ In small towns and villages across the province Kornilov’s death squads put up gallows in the square, hanged a few likely suspects and reinstalled the hated landlords by force. Rather than quell the unrest, such punitive action encouraged the Red partisan movement. Shumovsky’s unit had grown strong enough to take the fight to the enemy, carrying out successful raids on White outposts to capture arms and ammunition. The fighters enjoyed the active support of Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov, who were leading the defence of the nearby city of Tsaritsyn.⁴⁵

      Shumovsky’s band of partisans, 1918

      By the time young Shumovsky joined the fight, the Whites’ patience with the guerrilla attacks had reached breaking point. They decided to crush the partisan movement for good with an overwhelming force. Ahead of the harvest, the Whites unleashed a punitive expedition consisting of four elite regiments of troops supported by Czech mercenaries. When the partisans received the news of the approach of this powerful force, they prepared a last-ditch ambush at the village of Ternovsky. Shumovsky helped to dig deep defensive trenches around the village. Eager to fight, two thousand volunteers streamed into the village responding to the desperate call for help. Ipatov’s force had rifles, some machine guns and a captured field gun. The balance of defenders were enthusiastic but untrained farmers, armed only with homemade weapons.

      The enemy approached in strength at dawn, expecting little resistance from the village militia. To the defenders’ surprise, the Whites attacked head-on in a column, not even deploying properly for an attack. Maintaining uncharacteristic discipline, the partisans opened fire on the advancing enemy when they were just 150 yards away. The first volley stunned the Whites, who struggled to respond, not even returning fire. The partisan force, having quickly run out of ammunition, charged out of their trenches in pursuit of their broken enemy, waving pitchforks, shovels, axes, iron crowbars and homemade spears. No prisoners were taken. Shumovsky’s first taste of action had been brief, bloody and chaotic. The defenders celebrated their decisive victory and the booty of arms and ammunition that had fallen into their laps.⁴⁶

      The disparate village guerrilla groups combined in September 1918 to form the 2nd Worker-Peasant Stavropol Division.⁴⁷ Despite the grand-sounding name, the Division could only stage raids at night due to an acute shortage of weapons and ammunition, their weakness concealed by the cover of darkness. Ipatov, a former gunsmith, built a mobile cartridge factory manufacturing 7,000 rounds per day. Even so, by the end of the month the guerrillas, cut off from any outside supplies, were almost out of ammunition. Often, the guerrillas went into battle with only three or four rounds each. Outnumbered and outgunned, under constant pressure from the advancing White Guard, the partisan units had to retreat into the interior of the province and then beyond. They were proud to record that even in this difficult period, the division was able to organise a massive transport of grain to Stalin, besieged in the nearby city of Tsaritsyn. In return, Stalin, commanding the desperate defence of the city that would later bear his name – Stalingrad – gave the partisans much-needed weapons and ammunition.⁴⁸

      In late November 1918, the band suffered its first defeat and serious casualties in a failed attack on a White base. They lost hundreds of men. Exhausted by four months of continual fighting and retreats, the survivors were forced further and further to the north-east, away from their homes and support. From December 1918, the partisans started fighting against a new and formidable enemy, the well-armed Cossacks. Their new opponent was highly mobile and well versed in guerrilla war techniques. It was bitter, unrelenting winter warfare, pushing Shumovsky’s hungry unit onto the desolate Kalmyk steppe, a region known by Russians as ‘the end of the world’. In the freezing winter conditions, Shumovsky’s fighters suffered extreme hardship. For the hungry, poorly clothed and exhausted men, barely surviving on the bleak steppe, the final straw was a typhus epidemic. The disease was soon rampant not only in the army but in the rare settlements. By February, the steppe front was one large typhoid camp. It became necessary for the healthy to abandon the thousands of sick men, leaving them without protection from the advancing enemy. In early March, the 10th Red Army absorbed the remains of the partisans, and the survivors became the 32nd Infantry Division.⁴⁹ Now a member of the Red Army, Shumovsky swore the solemn oath he would keep for his whole life, that ‘I, a son of the working people, citizen of the Soviet Republic, Stanislav Shumovsky swear to spare no effort nor my very life in the battle for the Russian Soviet Republic.’

      The Red Army was an army in name only. After a succession of defeats, it was on the point of collapse when Shumovsky joined. Only a quarter of the former Russian Empire remained under Communist control and the Reds were in full undisciplined retreat. The leadership had eschewed the services of professional military officers and logistics, a sure recipe for disaster. Their defeats were down to cowardice, treachery and panic. Even the senior commanders ran away at the sound of the first shot. It was not the use of superior tactics but a lack of ammunition that, often as not, determined the outcome of battles. In the circumstances, promotion through the ranks was rapid for a dedicated young Communist such as Shumovsky. He was made first a squad leader then a machine-gun commander, and eventually a commissar. In the Civil War, fanatical teenagers, skinny boys in oversized uniforms, were regularly given command of large units made up of unreliable conscripts and recaptured deserters. The daily struggle for food took priority over military duties as the army lived off the land. Uniforms, including boots, were unavailable. The army provided its troops with no basic training, nor did it even teach its leaders rudimentary military tactics. With their inability to confront the Whites in a set-piece battle, the Red Army’s military strategy depended on encouraging the feverish formation of local militia units to stand against Denikin’s advancing volunteer army and supporting guerrilla attacks on the Whites’ weak civil administration. In practice, none of the individual Red guerrilla units were sufficiently organised to be effective. However, there were so many groups that they became a veritable plague on the Whites.

      After their run of bitter defeats, the Red Army finally introduced military discipline. The Soviet government established a Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic