page_title: Vladimir Lenin
section_title: Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War: 1918–1920
hierarchical_section_title: Vladimir Lenin / Lenin's government / Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War: 1918–1920
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Плакат «В жертву Интернационалу». Без выходных данных. Цветная литография, 1 лист, 63×89 смEnglish: "Sacrifice to the International", a White Russian anti-Bolshevik propaganda poster produced during the Russian Civil War. In this image, a number of senior Bolsheviks - Uritzky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Lunacharsky, Lenin, Patrovsky, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Radek - sacrifice an allegorical character representing Russia to a statue of Karl Marx. The figure of Alexander Kerensky can be seen behind these figures, looking on impotently. In the foreground are negative stereotypes of Red Army characters, a sailor, Jews, one of whom holds a bag of thirty pieces of silver, a reference to the Biblical figure of Judas Iscariot, and Asiatic soldiers with booty.
context_page_description: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party Marxist–Leninist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism.
  Born to a moderately prosperous middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
context_section_description: Lenin expected Russia's aristocracy and bourgeoisie to oppose his government, but he believed that the numerical superiority of the lower classes, coupled with the Bolsheviks' ability to effectively organise them, guaranteed a swift victory in any conflict. In this, he failed to anticipate the intensity of the violent opposition to Bolshevik rule in Russia. The ensuing Russian Civil War pitted the pro-Bolshevik Reds against the anti-Bolshevik Whites, but also encompassed ethnic conflicts on Russia's borders and conflict between both Red and White armies and local peasant groups, the Green armies, throughout the former Empire. Accordingly, various historians have seen the civil war as representing two distinct conflicts: one between the revolutionaries and the counter-revolutionaries, and the other between different revolutionary factions.
  The White armies were established by former Tsarist military officers, and included Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army in South Russia, Alexander Kolchak's forces in Siberia, and Nikolai Yudenich's troops in the newly independent Baltic states. The Whites were bolstered when 35,000 members of the Czech Legion—prisoners of war from the conflict with the Central Powers—turned against Sovnarkom and allied with the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), an anti-Bolshevik government established in Samara. The Whites were also backed by Western governments who perceived the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the Allied war effort and feared the Bolsheviks' calls for world revolution. In 1918, the United Kingdom, France, United States, Canada, Italy, and Serbia landed 10,000 troops in Murmansk, seizing Kandalaksha, while later that year British, American, and Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok. Western troops soon pulled out of the civil war, instead only supporting the Whites with officers, technicians and armaments, but Japan remained because they saw the conflict as an opportunity for territorial expansion.
  Lenin tasked Trotsky with establishing a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and with his support, Trotsky organised a Revolutionary Military Council in September 1918, remaining its chairman until 1925. Recognising their valuable military experience, Lenin agreed that officers from the old Tsarist army could serve in the Red Army, although Trotsky established military councils to monitor their activities. The Reds held control of Russia's two largest cities, Moscow and Petrograd, as well as most of Great Russia, while the Whites were located largely on the former Empire's peripheries. The latter were therefore hindered by being both fragmented and geographically scattered, and because their ethnic Russian supremacism alienated the region's national minorities. Anti-Bolshevik armies carried out the White Terror, a campaign of violence against perceived Bolshevik supporters which was typically more spontaneous than the state-sanctioned Red Terror. Both White and Red Armies were responsible for attacks against Jewish communities, prompting Lenin to issue a condemnation of anti-Semitism, blaming prejudice against Jews on capitalist propaganda.
  In July 1918, Sverdlov informed Sovnarkom that the Ural Regional Soviet had overseen the execution of the former Tsar and his immediate family in Yekaterinburg to prevent them from being rescued by advancing White troops. Although lacking proof, biographers and historians like Richard Pipes and Dmitri Volkogonov have expressed the view that the killing was probably sanctioned by Lenin; conversely, historian James Ryan cautioned that there was "no reason" to believe this. Whether Lenin sanctioned it or not, he still regarded it as necessary, highlighting the precedent set by the execution of Louis XVI in the French Revolution.
  After the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries had abandoned the coalition and increasingly viewed the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution. In July 1918, the Left Socialist Revolutionary Yakov Grigorevich Blumkin assassinated the German ambassador to Russia, Wilhelm von Mirbach, hopi
caption: A White Russian anti-Bolshevik propaganda poster, in which Lenin is depicted in a red robe, aiding other Bolsheviks in sacrificing Russia to a statue of Marx (c. 1918–1919)
exif: {}