Russian Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Civil War consumed the former Russian Empire from 1917 to 1922, leaving an estimated seven to twelve million people dead, the vast majority of them civilians. It began not as a clean conflict between two armies but as a fracture that spread in every direction at once, drawing in thirteen foreign states, rival socialist factions, anarchist militias, Cossack forces, and the remnants of an imperial army that had just finished fighting a world war. What started in the chaos of October 1917 would not truly end until the Red Army marched into Vladivostok in October 1922 and the last pocket of resistance surrendered in June 1923. The questions the war raised were enormous: who had the right to govern Russia, what kind of state would emerge from the wreckage of the Tsar's empire, and how far was any faction willing to go to win? The answers came at catastrophic cost, and shaped the rest of the twentieth century.

• 2. Revolution and Its Discontents

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  The Russian Empire entered World War I in 1914 alongside France and the United Kingdom. By 1917 the strains had become unbearable. The February Revolution forced Emperor Nicholas II to abdicate, and a Provisional Government of centrist parties took power alongside a network of elected councils of workers, soldiers, and peasants called soviets, creating what observers called a situation of dual power. The Provisional Government, led by the Socialist Revolutionary politician Alexander Kerensky, could not bring itself to end the war, and that failure proved fatal. A failed military coup by General Lavr Kornilov in September 1917 destroyed the government's credibility and drove voters toward the Bolsheviks, who promised to hand all power to the soviets and make peace immediately. Promising "all power to the Soviets," the Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky's government in late October 1917, on the eve of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The assault on Petrograd that night proceeded largely without human casualties. But the seizure of power immediately revealed a contradiction: in the elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks lost to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which won the majority of seats. Lenin's response, published in Pravda, argued that formal democracy was impossible given class conflicts. On the 18th of January 1918 the Assembly met for the first and last time; the Right SR Viktor Chernov was elected its president over the Bolshevik-backed candidate Maria Spiridonova. The Bolsheviks dissolved it the same day. Spiridonova herself would eventually break with the Bolsheviks and, after decades in the gulag, was shot on Stalin's orders in 1941.

• 3. Building an Army by Force

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  Leon Trotsky took charge of reorganizing the Bolsheviks' military forces in January 1918. The old Red Guards, volunteer groups of workers and army deserters, were insufficient for the scale of fighting ahead. Trotsky transformed them into a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army with conscription, political commissars assigned to every unit, and the systematic use of former Tsarist officers as military specialists. At the start of the civil war, former Tsarist officers made up three-quarters of the Red Army officer corps. By the war's end, 83 percent of all Red Army divisional and corps commanders were ex-Tsarist soldiers, many of whose families had been taken hostage to ensure their loyalty. Conscription of the rural peasantry was mandated in June 1919 when it became clear that a purely working-class army would not suffice. Compliance was extracted through hostage-taking and, when necessary, executions. The results were mixed: the Red Army grew larger than the Whites, but many of its members had no attachment to communist ideology. To prevent desertion, Trotsky authorized the formation of barrier troops in August 1918, units drawn from the Cheka punitive detachments and stationed behind front-line soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who withdrew without authorization. Trotsky authorized Mikhail Tukhachevsky, commanding the 1st Army, to deploy the first of these blocking detachments. In 1919 alone, 616 deserters classified as "hardcore" out of 837,000 draft dodgers and deserters were executed. Amnesty weeks were also declared, which brought 98,000-132,000 deserters voluntarily back to the army.

• 4. The White Movement and Its Allies

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  Alexander Kolchak came to power through a coup on the 18th of November 1918, when he was proclaimed "Supreme Ruler" and "Commander-in-Chief of all Land and Naval Forces of Russia" after two members of the governing Directory were arrested and deported. He became the central figure of the White movement, which drew together a wide coalition: conservative imperial officers, liberals, monarchists, and ultra-nationalists, united more by opposition to Bolshevism than by any shared positive program. Their principal slogan was "united and indivisible Russia," which meant restoring the empire's borders, denying self-determination to non-Russian peoples, and refusing independence movements throughout the former empire. The White movement became associated with antisemitic pogroms and propaganda, though the source notes its relationship with Jewish communities was complex in its early phase. Thirteen foreign states intervened against the Red Army, with the Allied powers chiefly seeking to re-establish the Eastern Front of World War I. Winston Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle." Britain and France sent troops into Russian ports. Three states of the Central Powers also intervened, seeking to hold territory they had received under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The scale of Allied support was substantial: Major Ewen Cameron Bruce of the British Army commanded a tank mission that assisted the Whites, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for storming the fortified city of Tsaritsyn single-handedly in a single tank during the June 1919 battle there, leading to the capture of over 40,000 prisoners. The fall of Tsaritsyn was described by contemporaries as one of the key battles of the entire war.

• 5. Terror and Resistance

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  Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed in December 1917 to lead the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, the Cheka, a predecessor of the KGB. The Bolsheviks had begun to see the anarchists and rival socialist factions as existential threats almost from the moment they took power. On the 1st of May 1918, a pitched battle took place in Moscow between anarchists and Bolshevik police. A turning point came when the SR Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin on the 30th of August 1918. During interrogation, Kaplan stated plainly: "My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own." She cited the forcible shutdown of the Constituent Assembly and called Lenin "a traitor to the Revolution." She was executed on the 3rd of September 1918, shot in the back of the head by the commander of the Kremlin, the former Baltic sailor P. D. Malkov. On Yakov Sverdlov's orders, her corpse was bundled into a barrel and set alight. Sverdlov had ordered the murder of the Tsar and his family only six weeks earlier. Kaplan's attack triggered the Red Terror, considered to have begun between the 17th and the 30th of August 1918. The peasantry faced its own form of coercion through grain requisitioning. Bolshevik food policies proclaimed in May 1918 sparked revolts in Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Saratov, and districts of Moscow, Novgorod, Petrograd, Pskov, and Smolensk. In the Novgorod region, rebelling peasants were dispersed with machine-gun fire from a train manned by Latvian Red Army soldiers. The barrier troops enforcing grain collection earned the hatred of the Russian civilian population. These policies contributed to the Russian famine of 1921-1922, which killed about five million people.

• 6. Fronts and Turning Points

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  The war in European Russia was fought across three main fronts: eastern, southern, and northwestern. In March 1919 the Whites launched a general offensive in the east; by mid-April Kolchak's forces had pushed as far as the Glazov-Chistopol-Bugulma-Buguruslan-Sharlyk line. The Red 5th Army under Tukhachevsky then counterattacked, capturing Elabuga on the 26th of May, Sarapul on the 2nd of June, and Izhevsk on the 7th. On the southern front, Denikin issued his Moscow directive on the 3rd of July 1919, ordering his armies to converge on the capital. By October, White forces had captured Kursk and Orel, the latter just 205 miles from Moscow, the closest they would ever come. Semyon Budyonny's cavalry defeated the Don Army at Voronezh on the 24th of October. By the 14th of November the Red Army had taken Kastornoye, a key rail junction, and retook Kursk two days later. In the northwest, General Yudenich attacked Petrograd in October 1919 with around 20,000 men and six British tanks that caused panic wherever they appeared. By the 19th of October his troops reached the outskirts of the city. Trotsky refused to concede it, declaring: "It is impossible for a little army of 15,000 ex-officers to master a working-class capital of 700,000 inhabitants." He armed workers, men and women alike, and transferred forces from Moscow; within weeks the Red defenders had tripled in size and outnumbered Yudenich three to one. Yudenich withdrew and his army was disarmed and interned by Estonian authorities. In the south, Russian and Allied ships evacuated around 40,000 of Denikin's men from Novorossiysk to Crimea in March 1920, leaving some 20,000 behind to be captured.

• 7. The War's Final Shape

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  Admiral Kolchak's end came not in battle but through betrayal. Traveling toward Irkutsk after losing Omsk, without the protection of his army, he was arrested by the disaffected Czechoslovak Legion and handed over to a socialist Political Centre. Six days later that regime was itself replaced by a Bolshevik-dominated Military-Revolutionary Committee. On the 6th and the 7th of February 1920, Kolchak and his prime minister Victor Pepelyaev were shot, and their bodies were pushed through the ice of the frozen Angara River. General Wrangel, who had replaced Denikin as White commander, mounted the last serious White campaign from Crimea in 1920. His fleet evacuated him and his army to Constantinople on the 14th of November 1920, ending White resistance in southern Russia. What followed was the settling of accounts with former allies. After defeating Wrangel, the Bolsheviks immediately repudiated their 1920 alliance with Nestor Makhno and the Ukrainian anarchists, beginning the campaign to liquidate Makhno's Insurgent Army with an attempted assassination of Makhno himself by Cheka agents. In March 1921 a naval mutiny broke out at Kronstadt, sailors demanding newly elected soviets to include socialist and anarchist groups, economic freedom, and an end to Bolshevik privilege. A thousand rebels were killed in battle and another thousand executed in the following weeks. The anti-Bolshevik Muslim Basmachi movement in Central Asia continued active resistance until 1934. The Ayano-Maysky District under Anatoly Pepelyayev, the last organized White holdout, surrendered in June 1923.

• 8. Nations Made and Broken

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  One consequence of the Bolshevik victory that the victors had not fully intended was the permanent reduction of Russia's territorial extent. Non-Russian peoples had used the chaos of the civil war to press for independence, and the results were uneven and often brutal. Finland declared independence in December 1917 and secured it through its own civil war from January to May 1918. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania repelled Soviet invasions and established themselves as independent republics. Estonia cleared its territory of the Red Army by January 1919; Baltic German volunteers captured Riga from the Red Latvian Riflemen on the 22nd of May, and the Estonian 3rd Division expelled them a month later, enabling the Republic of Latvia to form. In March 1921, the Peace of Riga split disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland on one side and Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine on the other. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia were occupied by the Red Army. The Whites' slogan of "united and indivisible Russia" had called for the restoration of imperial borders excluding only Poland and Finland, but the Bolshevik victory produced a different map: a Soviet Union built on the ruins of the empire, formally established in the territory that the Red Army had managed to hold. The "temporary" ban on factions that Lenin imposed within the Russian Communist Party in response to Kronstadt in 1921 remained in force until the revolutions of 1989, a fact that critics argued hollowed out democratic procedures within the party and laid the foundation for Stalin's later consolidation of power.