After their run of bitter defeats, the Red Army finally introduced military discipline. The Soviet government established a Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic with a single commander-in-chief for all fronts. Unity of command would save the Red Army in the large-scale battles of 1919. The army developed the ability to transfer troops between fronts at times of pressing need. The establishment of an overall operational command and an insistence on the strict execution of combat orders led to an improvement in fighting ability over the lacklustre performance of the independent amateur partisan units. The reintroduction of the basic principles of a regular professional army – namely complete submission to orders, a strict hierarchy and rigid discipline – helped strengthen the combat capability of the Red Army to first confront, then overpower the Whites. The Red Army officers were now appointed according to military ability, not elected by the popular acclaim of their troops. Orders and plans were no longer put forward to the troops for debate. In extremis, Leon Trotsky introduced the infamous ‘blocking troops’. He ordered the positioning of machine-gunners behind Red Army attacks to shoot waverers, deserters and shirkers.
The most important reform, however, was the introduction of a system of dual command. Professional military officers were paired with committed commissars, such as Shumovsky, to jointly command units. Commissars monitored not only the activities of military experts, but carried out the Communist Party’s policy in the armed forces to ‘provide class rallying, enlighten and educate personnel in the spirit of Communism’. This was a euphemism for removing the criminal elements in uniform that preyed on the civilian population.
The large-scale battles of 1919, stretched over southern and central Russia, involved hundreds of thousands of combatants on each side, and would determine the outcome of the Civil War. In the south of Russia, the Red Army faced its largest and most determined opponent, the well-equipped army of the fierce General Denikin. He was heavily supported both financially and militarily by the British and the Americans, while the Western powers turned a blind eye to the mounting evidence of an unpalatable genocide – known as the ‘White Terror’ – behind Denikin’s front lines. There were large-scale massacres of suspected Communists and Jews, who were often seen as one and the same, in the territory that fell under Denikin’s control. In their vast summer offensive, the Whites were able to deploy tanks, armoured cars and significant quantities of artillery, and advanced with the support of mercenary British pilots who bombed the retreating Reds. Denikin’s goal was to deliver a coordinated knockout blow on Moscow. He believed its capture would ensure the complete destruction of Communism.
Denikin’s army came close to achieving its goal, driving the enthusiastic but largely inept Red opponents before them. However, his army overran its supply lines and, lacking reserves, allowed the hard-pressed Red Army to bring up reinforcements first to halt the advance and then launch a large-scale counter-attack. In the midst of the renewed savage fighting in November 1919 for the critical Stavropol region, Shumovsky was wounded in the head by shrapnel near Kamyshin.50
By the end of the seesaw campaigning season of 1919, it was clear that the Communists would not only survive but were in the ascendancy. Winston Churchill, Britain’s Minister of War and the architect of foreign intervention, was forced to bow to his public’s war-weariness and pull his troops out of Russia, having failed to strangle Communism in the cradle as he had pledged.51 Without British finance, arms, advisors and strong diplomatic hands to guide them, the White opposition movement squabbled among themselves and teetered on the brink of complete collapse. Their armies retreated on all fronts, a mere shadow of their former military power. By January 1920 the reformed Red Army had advanced to knock on the door of the Caucasus. Shumovsky was wounded for a second time, this time in the leg, during the rapid advance on the strategic town of Rostov-on-Don.52 The defeated White General Denikin lost half his army in a disastrous retreat to Novorossiysk and was replaced as overall White commander by the more capable General Baron Wrangel, who is immortalised in the popular marching song of the Red Army:
The White Army and the Black Baron
Are preparing to restore to us the Tsar’s throne,
But from the taigafn11 to the British seas
The Red Army is the strongest of all!
But the feared Baron Wrangel could only hole up with what remained of his beaten forces in Crimea to await his inevitable exile. Lenin decided the time was now right to seize Baku’s oil wealth. The 11th Army – into which Shumovsky had been transferred – was given the task of supporting a planned workers’ uprising. The tide of war had turned, bringing him home.
• • •
Following the Turkish withdrawal, the British had returned in force, determined to stay in the region. They found Baku, a once beautiful town which had fallen into decay, much to their liking. When oil was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, the city had become almost overnight one of the wealthiest on earth, with every famous European luxury store opening a branch on Baku’s elegant tree-lined avenues. British naval officers requisitioned the oil barons’ magnificent palaces and villas as they set about building a strong naval force to control the Caspian Sea. The ruthless British tactics involved first disarming their allies before moving out to attack the weak Red Navy. The Communist flotilla in the Caspian Sea was no match for the better-equipped British-backed forces. The British complained to London that the Reds refused to come out of port to fight them. But by March 1920, on Winston Churchill’s orders, the British were long gone, and the region was a ripe plum ready to fall into Communist laps. The opposition, such as it remained, was deeply divided. The Whites refused to countenance any rapprochement with the Nationalists. Independent Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan dissipated their energies fighting territorial disputes between themselves. Each was in a state of financial and economic collapse. Epidemics of typhus raged unchecked, brought in by the hordes of refugees from the fighting. Just days after the campaign started, and without firing a shot, Shumovsky and the victorious 11th Army were marching down the streets of Baku. Soon Lenin was preparing a grander plan to establish Soviet power over the whole Caucasus region.
On his eighteenth birthday, 9 May 1920, his very first opportunity to do so, Stanislav Shumovsky became a full member of the Soviet Communist Party. He was to remain an active Party member for the rest of his life, earning the right to one of the first fifty-year anniversary membership medals awarded.fn12 53
Although the government in Baku had no stomach for a fight with the Reds, many in Azerbaijan were not so eager to abandon their religion and embrace the ideals of Communism. Civilian revolts and mutinies centred on the old capital of Ganja. Shumovsky’s army was tasked with suppressing the revolts in Azerbaijan and Dagestan, dangerous counter-guerrilla operations. On the hot summer’s day of 3 July 1920, as he was slogging up the mountain roads at Agdam at the head of his unit, advancing towards his hometown of Shusha, Shumovsky suffered his third and most severe wound when he was shot through the neck.54 During his recuperation, the 11th Army mopped up all remaining opposition to Communist rule in the Caucasus in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The agonies of the Civil War were over.
• • •
As an able, committed soldier, Shumovsky would serve in the Red Army for a further six years,55 taking on increasingly important administrative roles in major cities across the Soviet Union. He married Vera, and in 1922 they had a daughter, Maya.56 In December 1924, he transferred to Smolensk to fulfil his childhood dream – for in the spring of 1925, Shumovsky climbed into the front pilot’s seat of a two-man Polikarpov R-1 at an airfield of the newly formed Red air force at Smolensk.57 The mechanic spun the propeller and the engine coughed into life. Turning the aircraft into the wind, Shumovsky pointed its nose down the long grass runway, revving the motor. Opening the throttle close to maximum, he waited for sufficient speed to finally pull back on the stick to adjust the flaps, giving the plane enough lift to gently rise off the ground. With a broad grin spread across his face, Shumovsky had joined his boyhood band of heroes as a pilot. His observer reached forward