Russian Civil War

The **Russian Civil War** was a large conflict over the former Russian Empire. The collapse of the Russian empire in 1917 triggered a complex series of interlocking conflicts that lasted into the 1920s and are estimated to have cost 13 million lives, mostly civilian victims of famine and of the massacre and depredation practiced by all sides in the Civil War.

## Background

In October 1917 the Bolshevik party seized power in the Russian capital, Petrograd. The new revolutionary government was engaged in armed struggle from the very start.

### The end of an era

The uprising of February 1917 that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II set up a Provisional Government. The Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, staged a coup on the night of 24 October 1917. The coup was masterminded by Leon Trotsky, leader of the Petrograd Soviet (revolutionary committee), and armed workers and revolutionary former soldiers (Red Guards) played a prominent role. Alexander Kerensky, head of the provisional government, called on the army to regain control, but it failed, confirming Lenin's grip on power.

In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, which deprived Russia of one-third of the people and territory of its empire. Now Azerbaijan, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, and Finland became nominally independent German satellites.

## War

At the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty that took Russia out of World War I, Lenin's Bolshevik revolutionary government controlled the cities of Petrograd and Moscow, but its hold on the rest of Russia was fragile or non-existent. The Bolshevik People's Commissar for War, Leon Trotsky, founded the Worker's and Peasant's Red Army in February 1918, initially based on the Red Guards who had helped bring the Bolsheviks to power. Enemies of the regime began to assemble forces of their own: the Cossacks of the Kuban and Don regions of southern Russia revolted against Bolshevik rule, while former tsarist General Anton Denikin formed an army in southern Ukraine. Such groups were known as "Whites", in contrast to the Bolshevik "Reds".

### Foreign involvement

The situation was complicated by the presence of foreign troops. In spring 1918 some 30,000 Czechs, who had been taken prisoner by the Russians while soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian Army, were travelling along the Trans-Siberian Railway towards the Pacific port of Vladivostok, from where they intended to join the Allied forces in France. Local clashes with the Bolshevik authorities en route flared into full-scale fighting. The Czechs soon controlled a swathe of Siberian territory, allowing Admiral Alexander Kolchak to establish himself as head of a Siberian-based anti-Bolshevik Russian government.

Other foreign troops also arrived in Russia. The northern ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk were occupied primarily by the British; Japanese and American troops took control of Vladivostok; and the French landed forces at Odessa on the Black Sea. These interventions were in part motivated by a desire to prevent weapons and munitions sent to Russia for use against Germany falling into the wrong hands. But Allied governments also wished for the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime in order to prevent its ideas of revolution spreading to their own countries.

In practice, foreign troops played little part in the civil War. The intervntion was in fact deeply unpopular with working-class movements in Britain and France, and with many of the military personnel sent to Russia. A mutiny by French sailors at Odessa in April 1919 underlined the severity of the problem and most of the foreign troops had left by the end of that year. But Britain and France continued to supply and encourage the White armies.

### Factionalism and terror

Unopposed intervention by foreign forces was possible because of the chaos that dominated Russia in 1919. As well as the Cossacks and the White armies - which incljuded not only the combined forces of Kolchak and Denikin, but also armies formed by General Pyotr Wrangel in the Caucasus and General Nikolai Yudenich in Estonia - there was a peasant "Black Army" led by anarchist Nestor Makhno that established a formidable presence in Ukraine.

The war was conducted with almost inconceivable savagery, crude terror serving as a weapon on all sides. Much of the strategy focused on extracting grain from peasants to feed men and horses - the side that got the grain would win, the peasants always lost. Fought over wide distances with few tanks or aircraft involved, it was the last major war in which the cavalry was an offensive force.

### Creation of the Red Army

The survival of the Bolshevik regime depended upon Leon Trotsky's ruthless organizational genius, which forged the Red Army into an effective instrument of war. The ranks were filled by peasants conscripted at gunpoint, and thousands of former tsarist officers were recruited as "military experts" to lead their forces. Discipline was enforced by terror, with the families of officers held as hostages to ensure their loyalty. Although they were surrounded by enemies, the Reds were able to exploit the disunity of the enemy, and defeated various groups one by one over the next two years.

Commanded by 26-year-old Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red forces won back Siberia from Kolchak in the course of 1919 - the admiral was captured and shot in February 1920. The Reds also triumphed over General Denikin in southern Ukraine, after his army had been weakened through clashes with Makhno's Blacks. In October, however, the Bolsheviks almost lost Petrograd to Yudenich's 20,000-strong army. Trotsky prepared a desperate defense of the city and Yudenich halted in the outskirts, withdrawing the following month.

The Red Army faced a new challenge in April 1920. Marshal Josef Pilsudski, leader of the Polish forces, was keen to establish his country's borders as far east as possible. Aided by anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian nationalists, Polish forces invaded Belarus and the Ukraine, occupying Kiev and Minsk with ease. The Red Army launched a counterattack in June, spearheaded by Semyon Budyonny's First Cavalry Army. The Russians managed to sweep the Poles back across the border, and had pursued them to the gates of Warsaw by August. Aided by a French military mission, the Polish forces regrouped, fought back, and claimed a historic victory. The exhaused Red Army retreated, after which an armistice was agreed.

Meanwhile, the last of the White generals, Wrangel, had launched an offensive from the Crimea. However, once the fighting in Poland ended, he was doomed and had tretreat to the coast. His followers were evacuated on British ships in November 1920. The Red Army then turned on Makhno's forces, which were brutally crushed.

This marked the end of the Civil War as a serious contest for power, although scattered fighting - some of it savage - continued until Vladivostok fell to the Red Army in October 1922.

## Aftermath

Victory in the Russian Civil War allowed the Bolsheviks - renamed the Communist Party - to found the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December 1922.

### Russia Starves

The Civil War brought huge devastation. By 1920 cities were depopulated and typhus raged freely. Preyed upon by soldiers, who conscripted their sons and stole their grain, peasants ceased to grow crops. Worsened by drought, the collapse of the harvest led to a famine in 1921 that killed millions.

### Revolutionary Rule

Russia's new government established its rule over much of the pre-war Russian Empire, regaining most of the territory lost under the Brest-Litovsk treaty. However, it had to accept the loss of land to Poland and the independence of the Baltic states and Finland. Except for most of Finland, these areas were retaken by the USSR in 1939-40.

### Decline of the Red Army

Civil War hero Tukhachevsky played a leading role in modernizing the Red Army in the 1930s. He was an advocate of "deep operations", which involved the combined use of tanks and aircraft. In 1937 he was one of a number of men arrested and shot as part of Stalin's Great Purge of likely opponents. In the process, the Red Army was weakened in the run-up to World War II.