The columns of Kazanovich, Drozdovsky and Pokrovsky, the cavalry of Ulagai, and the newly formed Kuban Cavalry Division, commanded by a former mining engineer who had been a junior officer at the beginning of the war, and was now General Wrangel, were withdrawn from the Kuban for that purpose.
The Taman army fought for twenty-eight days.
Its regiments were destroyed one after another in the iron grip of a foe rich in munitions.
The rains had set in, and there were not enough greatcoats, boots or cartridges to go round.
There was nowhere to look for help, for the rest of the Caucasian army, cut off from Stavropol, was retreating to the east.
The men of the Taman army, encircled by the enemy, lashed out with terrific strength.
Their commander, Kozhukh, succumbed to typhus.
Almost all the best commanders had been wounded or killed.
But by the end of November, the Taman army at last managed to break through the front.
The heroic Taman army was reduced to pitiful remnants, barefoot and in rags.
Relinquishing Stavropol, they fell back to the northeast upon Blagodatnoye.
There was no pursuit—the bad weather and autumn rains had brought the White advance to a standstill.
* XII *
October marked a twelve month since the peoples inhabiting Russia began demanding an end to the war.
The countless groans, the myriad shouts of "Down with the war! Down with the bourgeoisie prolonging it, the military caste waging it, the landowners feeding it!" merged in the single, impressive shot fired at the Winter Palace from the deck of the cruiser Aurora.
Who could have foreseen that the shell which landed among the tinted lead figures and ornate black vases with which the top of that detested building bristled, crashing through the roof, to explode in the royal bedroom, where the couch on which Kerensky had tossed in sleepless hysteria all night was still warm, the shell which seemed at the time to have been the final chord of a revolution whose slogan was "war on the palaces, peace to the huts," would ring out from end to end of the boundless country, and, reverberating like an echo, would gain in volume and insistency with every peal, till it attained the irresistible strength of a hurricane?
Who could have believed that a country which had only just laid down its arms would be capable of taking them up again, and of rising in a war of class against class, poor against rich? Who could have expected that an immense army like Denikin's would spring into being from a handful of Kornilov's officers, that a riot which began on Czechoslovak troop trains would develop into war involving hundreds of miles of the Volga district, and, spreading to Siberia, lead to the brief reign of Kolchak? And, again, could it have been foreseen that a blockade would get a stranglehold on the land of the Soviets, and that maps and globes would appear with one-sixth of the earth's surface unpainted, unnamed—a blank space, heavily outlined in black?
Who could have believed that Russia, cut off from the seas, and the grain districts, from coal, and from oil, starving, impoverished, typhus-ridden, would put up such a fight, doggedly sending her sons to the slaughter again and again? In the previous year men were deserting at the front, and the country seemed to have become a formless swamp, but this was a mere superficial impression: in reality, potent forces of cohesion were making themselves felt throughout the country, and aspirations for justice were beginning to tinge the bare struggle for existence.
Wonderful men and women, the like of whom had never before been seen, made their appearance, and their exploits were discussed everywhere with awe-struck admiration.
The Soviet land was shaken by internal disturbances.
At one and the same time that there were risings in Yaroslavl (subsequently spreading to Murom, Arsamas, Rostov-Veliky and Rybinsk), the "Left Socialist-Revolutionaries" were revoltinig in Moscow.
On the sixth of July, two of them, bearing papers on which the signature of Dzerzhinsky had been forged, called upon Count Mirbach, the German ambassador, and engaged him in conversation, in the course of which they fired at him and threw a bomb.
The ambassador was killed by the last shot, which caught him in the back of the head as he was trying to escape from the room.
That evening, armed sailors and Red Army men appeared all along the Chistye Prudi and Yauza Boulevard.
They stopped cars and pedestrians, searched them, took away any arms and money found on them, and took them to the Morozov mansion in Trekhsvyatiteli Street, the headquarters of the rising.
Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had gone to the house in search of the murderers of Mirbach, was there, under arrest.
Arrests went on through the evening and part of the night.
The telegraph was in the hands of the insurgents.
But no one dared to attack the Kremlin as yet.
There were about two thousand insurgents, forming a front from the river Yauza to the Chistye Prudi Boulevard.
The Kremlin had nothing but telephone communication and its own ancient walls to rely on.
Troops were encamped in the Khodinskoye Field, and many of the men had been given leave for the holiday of Ivan Kupala.
The atmosphere inside the Kremlin was tense.
Towards morning, however, they were able to get hold of some eight hundred soldiers, three batteries, and a few armoured cars; the troops began the attack at 7 a.m., bombarding and completely demolishing the Morozov mansion in Trekhsvyatiteli Street.
There was a lot of noise, but the victims were few, the "army of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries" escaping through side streets and backyards to some unknown destination.
Their commander, Popov, a loose-lipped youth with crazed eyes, disappeared from Moscow.
A year later he reappeared as the chief of Makhno's counterintelligence, and became notorious for refined cruelty.
The risings were suppressed both on the Volga and in Moscow.
But rebellion lurked everywhere: rebellion against the Bolsheviks, against the Germans, against the Whites.
Villages rose against towns, and looted them.
Towns deposed the Soviet power.
The era of independent republics began—they grew up and burst like puffballs, some so tiny that a rider could have galloped all round their boundaries in the space of twenty-four hours.
The Soviet government exerted all its powers to cope with this anarchy.
And it was at such a time that it was dealt a terrible blow: on the thirtieth of August, after a meeting held at the Michelson Works, Fanny Kaplan, a Right-wing "Socialist-Revolutionary" (from the same organization as the man with the death's-head pin) shot at Lenin, wounding him dangerously.
On the thirty-first of the month, a detachment of men dressed from head to foot in black leather marched through the streets of Moscow, bearing before it on two staffs, a banner with the single word: "TERROR".... Meetings were held day and night at all the factories of Moscow and Petrograd.
The workers were calling for drastic measures.
On the fifth of September the Moscow and Petrograd papers came out with an ominous headline:
THE RED TERROR
"...All Soviets are required to make immediate arrests of Right S-R's, the representatives of the big bourgeoisie and officers, and hold them as hostages.... Any attempt at escape or incitement to rebellion to be met with mass shooting.... It is essential for us to safeguard our rear, immediately and finally, against the White-Guard curs.... Let there be no hesitation in applying terror on a mass scale...."
In those days the most rigid economy of electric power had to be practised in the cities, and whole districts were sometimes left without light.