Russian Civil War

12 Key excerpts on "Russian Civil War"

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  The Military History of the Soviet Union

  • R. Higham(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  P A R T I THE FORMATION OF THE SOVIET ARMY AND NAVY C H A P T E R 2 THE Russian Civil War, 1917–1921 David R. Stone THE Russian Civil War WAS A VICIOUS AND EPIC STRUGGLE between the Reds—Bolsheviks and their sympathizers—and all those who attempted to stop them from cementing their control over Russia. These included sepa- ratists from the non-Russian territories around the fringes of the old Russ- ian empire, peasant anarchists who wanted little but to be left alone, and (most prominently) the Whites. The Whites were the last remnants of Rus- sia’s old regime, especially military officers, government officials, and the leaders of pre-revolutionary Russia’s political parties. The war between the Reds and Whites and all the other warring fac- tions was fiendishly complex, and defies any attempts to force it into a neatly coherent narrative. In the Bolsheviks’ campaign to retain and expand their newly won power after October 1917, they confronted internal and external opposition from their non-Bolshevik fellow socialists, two exceedingly dan- gerous right-wing competitors from Siberia and southern Russia, along with other White armies, a host of nationalist movements aimed at splitting parts of the tsarist patrimony away from Soviet Russia, intervention by a host of foreign states, and not least massive and violent opposition from the peas- antry under Soviet rule. Fronts moved with dizzying rapidity back and forth across Russia, accompanied by near-total social breakdown, epidemic dis- ease, and mass hunger. The Civil War is thus far more complex than can be portrayed in a short summary; the best this chapter can hope to do is indi- cate the most important developments. 14 Despite this complexity, we can simplify matters somewhat by concen- trating on the two groups that had a serious potential for overturning Bol- shevik rule, rather than simply denying the Bolsheviks control of imperial Russia’s peripheries or hindering Bolshevik attempts to consolidate power.

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  Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Twentieth-Century Europe

  • Nicholas Atkin(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  In the course of 1917–21, the Russian peoples experienced social and political revolution, The Russian Civil War. Map by David S. Heidler. 50 The Daily Lives of Civilians in the Russian Civil War 51 famine, War Communism, and the so-called Red Terror, all of which fore- shadowed the experiences to be endured under Stalin. In the words of one historian, the Civil War, and its associated hardships, was merely one ele- ment in “a people’s tragedy.” 1 Another notes that the Civil War and Revo- lution should not be divorced from preceding experiences, but viewed as a “continuum of crisis.” 2 It was yet another terrible convulsion, following on from Russia’s disastrous part in World War One, the February Revolu- tion (which ousted the tsarist regime), and the Bolshevik takeover of Oc- tober 1917 (which toppled the Provisional Government). The three-year Civil War resulted in the deaths of between 7 million and 8 million people, both military personnel and civilians; the destruction of industry and ag- riculture; and the beginnings of Russia’s diplomatic isolation. 3 Given the complexities of the Civil War, historians have generally fo- cused on the broader aspects of the military campaign. Politics, the Bolshe- vik Party, Lenin, Trotsky, and the foreign interventions by Britain, France, the United States, and Czechoslovakia, thus dominate the historiography. 4 The everyday experiences of civilians have been given little thought, and merely form a backdrop to the revolution itself. Consequently, delineating the lives of ordinary people in the Civil War is no easy task. Aware of this challenge, this chapter nonetheless dwells on the diversity of the war: its urban and rural manifestations, the impact of the famine and, finally, the routing of the Volunteer Army, which prompted mass evacuation and an international refugee crisis. THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR The Russian Civil War began in late 1917, in the wake of the October Bol- shevik takeover.

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  European Warfare 1815-2000

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Thus the inter-war years became an unprecedented era of popular upheaval and political radicalism that can be regarded as a European Civil War, a period of revolution and reaction during which liberal political orders were swept away and re-placed with new authoritarian formulas of social control. The Russian and the Spanish civil wars represented the most 104 European Civil Wars 1917-39 105 violent manifestations of this confrontation between left and right, Reds versus Whites.' Bridging the two World Wars, they shared not only the horrors of a fratricidal conflict but also an unprec-edented impact upon the international balance of power. No other belligerent state was as affected by the Great War so much as Imperial Russia. While the mobilisation of fifteen million peasants destroyed its traditional fabric of society, the country's industrial capabilities proved unable to match the military needs of modern warfare. As the precarious transport system virtually collapsed, the army constantly suffered from shortages of cloth-ing, rifles and munitions. Simultaneously, mounting inflation and food and fuel rationing shattered the home front. War-weariness and popular discontent were exacerbated by scandals of corruption in the court, large-scale profiteering and hoard-ing. As soldiers began to desert in large numbers, industrial militancy rocked the cities. Eventually, on 23 February 1917, a spontaneous women's protest in Petrograd against the rising price of bread became a revolution when first the workers and then the local garrison turned against the authorities. After days of bloody clashes, the regime collapsed and Tsar Nicholas II himself was advised by his officers to abdicate on 1 March. 2 The February Revolution produced an exceptional political formula, the co-existence of a Provisional Government formed by members of the last monarchist parliament and Soviets of soldiers, workers and peasants which sprang up with the demise of the old order.

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  Circles of the Russian Revolution

  Internal and International Consequences of the Year 1917 in Russia

  • Łukasz Adamski, Bartłomiej Gajos, Łukasz Adamski, Bartłomiej Gajos(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 In this chapter we shall touch on some of these issues, but at the outset it is worth nothing that it is unlikely that any one macro-level explanation will satisfactorily account for the scale and multiplicity of forms of violence that characterized the twentieth-century or, in our case, the Civil War in Soviet Russia.

  The Russian Civil War was a period of extreme social strife, when economic, social and political structures collapsed alarmingly, giving way to levels of conflict that had not been seen since the early seventeenth century. The Civil War not only comprised a fierce battle between the Red Army and the White armies, and between the Red Army and the armies of the Allied interventionists, it also extended to conflict between Reds and the Komuch, i.e. the Socialist Revolutionaries who won the Constituent Assembly elections of November 1917 and who had the military backing of the Czech Legion, and conflict involving armies of non-Russian nationalists seeking various degrees of independence from the former empire. In addition to conventional warfare, warlords (atamany ) rampaged in Ukraine, Siberia and the Far East, seizing territory and resources and terrorizing populations; the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno acted largely independently in Ukraine; and there were Red partisans behind White lines in Siberia. Across almost the whole of European Russia there were localized and later mass uprisings by peasants resisting food requisitioning and conscription; and local communities took advantage of generalized lawlessness to settle historical scores. Finally, as law and order broke down, the crime rate soared and, in some regions, bandits preyed on local communities. At times this was a war of almost unimaginable barbarity: one in which peasants boiled alive “commissars”; in which rampaging soldiers slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews; in which Red and White terror ran amuck.5

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  Russia's International Relations in the Twentieth Century

  • Alastair Kocho-Williams(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  While this inflamed an already tense political situation, Lenin moved quickly to the establishment of Russia as a one-party state with the Bolsheviks as the party of government. He split the SR majority by briefly including Left SRs in the new government, declared the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) to be bourgeois and put pressure on other socialists groups to disband during the spring and summer of 1918. While this put the Bolsheviks into a position of greater power, it also served to alienate other revolutionary and progressive groups, which would have consequences later in 1918. So too the Bolsheviks found that their adoption of centralized planning and requisitioning, labelled War Communism, would alienate sectors of the Russian population, particularly the peasantry. While the disastrous situation caused by War Communism would not really be felt until famine and peasant unrest in 1920 and 1921, Russia was on the brink of civil war by summer 1918.

  Against the backdrop of a political climate that showed that the Bolsheviks were not universally perceived to be legitimate in the first half of 1918, the forces of counter-revolution crystallized. The White movement, in opposition to the Bolshevik Reds, was multifaceted and disparate in terms of political background, desire and geographical location. The one thing that the Whites had, though, was a common goal – the destruction of Bolshevik power. With the organization of military units under Generals Alexander Kornilov, Anton Denikin and Peter Wrangel in the Caucasus and under Baron Roman Ungern-Sternberg and Admiral Alexander Kolchak in Siberia, the Whites and the Reds became locked in civil war. There was no clear aim beyond the removal of the Bolsheviks, although Denikin and Kolchak had notions of forming some kind of government, the latter having more success in the establishment of the ‘Directorate’ at Omsk. The lack of a single purpose meant that the Whites were somewhat disorganized and ineffective against the more coordinated Red forces that the Bolsheviks commanded. Even so, a bitter and fierce Civil War raged in the period 1918–20.

  White forces, despite their deficiencies of unified purpose beyond the destruction of Bolshevism, pushed towards the Russian core, which the Bolsheviks had successfully gained in late 1917 and early 1918, in European Russia. The assault came from three main directions: Siberia, the South and via the Baltic States. There was some degree of success of the part of the Whites into 1919, but in the end it was the Bolsheviks who were the victors of the Civil War and repelled the forces of counter-revolution.

  Those who fought against the Bolsheviks were not only anti-Bolshevik elements from the former Russian Empire. Foreign powers intervened on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War, making the conflict one with an international dimension. Forces from Great Britain, France, the United States and Japan joined the fray in the summer of 1918, initially stating their aim as being the prevention of allied war materials from falling into German hands, and in order to potentially reignite the Eastern Front and defeat Germany. However, foreign forces remained in Russia after the German defeat and joined in the fight against the Reds.

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  Armies of Occupation

  • Roy A. Prete, A. Hamish Ion, Roy A. Prete, A. Hamish Ion(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    (Publisher)

  WHITES AND REDS IN SOUTH RUSSIA, 1917-20 PETER KENEZ This page intentionally left blank A HE RUSSIAN Revolution is best understood as a pr authority collapsed. The institutions of the tsarist regime could not stand the test of a modern war and the ideology that motivated the tsar and his ministers was inappropriate at a time when circumstances demanded mass mobilization. Similarly, the main lesson of the com-plex and confusing events of the revolutionary year 1917 was that the liberal ideology of the provisional government was no more capable of holding the country together at a time of war and extraordinary hard-ships than the ideology of the tsarist government had been. Anarchy threatened the Russian people. 1 T HE CIVIL war, which inevitably followed the revolution, was a time in which several groups of people experimenting with different ideologies, drawing support from different social groups, competed in trying to recreate order and trying to reimpose discipline on the Rus-sian people. The difficult task was not to defeat the enemy; all sides were weak. The real problems were to stay in power and to overcome anarchy. From this approach to the Russian Revolution and civil war, it follows that the decisive struggles did not take place on the battlefields. Instead, in order to understand this crucial period, we must focus on the mundane issues of administration, organization of local govern-ment, and subversion of hitherto autonomous social organizations. It is evident that out of the innumerable groups who struggled against one another only two had a chance of victory: the Whites and Reds. It is not that they were the most popular; a civil war is not a popularity contest. The elections to the Constituent Assembly clearly showed that the majority of Russians in fact preferred neither ex-tremes but wanted a moderate socialist system, and about two-thirds of the voters chose the Socialist Revolutionaries.

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  War and Revolution in Russia, 1914-22

  The Collapse of Tsarism and the Establishment of Soviet Power

  • Christopher Read(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  The main distinction is that it was not fought between easily definable and territorially contiguous entities. Even more than regu-lar warfare, civil war is politics with guns. A major effect of this is that the war was not so much along a frontline but was more like a patch-work quilt, red patches here, white patches there, green patches (that is, freelance, usually peasant rebels who tried to avoid absorption into the Red forces) scattered around, and many patches which combined the main colours. For example, when Moscow so foolishly lost control of Siberia it left pockets of Soviet power in certain cities like Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk, some components of which went underground, awaiting their moment. The city of Omsk, on the other hand, became a capital for the anti-Bolshevik forces. In other words, a map of the Russian Civil War resembles a political map rather than a military one. 140 WAR AND REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA, 1914–22 Like red states and blue states in the US, there might be clusters but no clear line dividing all the red states from all the blue ones. The partial exception to this was the territory held directly by the Bolsheviks which was, more or less, consolidated but fluctuating. The area ‘controlled’ by the Soviet Government included most of the Russian, Siberian and Ukrainian heartlands in late 1917, but by 1919 it retained only 10–20 per cent of the territory of the former tsarist empire. There were also pockets of opposition, some of it underground, within the territory it claimed to govern, and pockets of support beyond, but it was more contiguous than the areas domi-nated by the anti-Bolshevik forces, and this came to have a crucial importance for the civil war. A prime reason for the failure of the anti-Bolshevik crusade was that its only secure territory was that on which its armies stood. As they moved forward or back they left politi-cal vacuums or, worse, opponents, to take over.

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  Captives of Revolution

  The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918–1923

  • Scott B. Smith(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  Yet the distinctions they drew, and the ironic juxtaposition of the “Russian-Russian front” to the other fronts, show how the World War framed the nascent civil war. Throughout 1918, SRs also interpreted political and social conflict, and the interplay of national movements and state-building campaigns, in light of the World War. A tour of the front pages of Petrogradskoe ekho in January and Feb-ruary thus maps some of the contours of the conceptual space in which the Russian Civil War developed. At the same time, it seemed as self-evident to most SRs as it did to the edi-tors of Petrogradskoe ekho that the violence of 1918 marked an intensification of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917. Even as they sought to relate the civil war to the larger World War, SRs thus also interpreted the civil war in terms of the categories that had shaped their understanding of the revolution. How to bring into coherent focus these two conceptions—the civil war as an extension of the revolution and the civil war as part of the World War—posed the first of the many dilemmas of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR) in the civil war. This challenge proved particularly difficult for SRs because of the way that the two political languages through which they sought to make sense of events, the language of class and the language of nationhood, shaped different understand-ings of events and situated those events in different narratives. Class, Nation, and Civil War The language of class generally held sway on the left wing of the party, where socialism and revolution were the keywords, while the language of nationhood contributed more to the political vocabulary and outlook of the party’s right wing. Nevertheless, each wing of the party sought to fix the meaning of events in terms of both idioms and to negotiate the tension between the two ways of conceptualizing the civil war.

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  Tankograd

  The Formation of a Soviet Company Town: Cheliabinsk, 1900s-1950s

  • L. Samuelson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  13 The Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Civil War that followed between 1918 and 1921 are usually described from the centre of events – Petrograd and Moscow. This book, however, focuses on how the city of Cheliabinsk and its surroundings changed before World War I and on the condi- tions in which the new Soviet power was established in the Southern Urals. The takeover of power in November 1917 by the Red Guards and Workers’ soviets created an unstable situation. There were profound con- flicts with other groups in society – merchants, peasants and, most of all, the Cossacks in Orenburg. Many decisive moments in the Civil War took place in the Southern Urals. The New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s seemed for a short time to have created a model for the recovery of the country and the evolution of a ‘mixed economy’. Ambitious invest- ment targets in the five-year plans set in 1928–1929 changed the situ- ation. Stalin and the leaders of the Bolshevik Party opted for the swift collectivisation of agriculture, which changed the Ural countryside pro- foundly. The ‘flight from the countryside’ to the cities was a major factor in determining the character of the new industrial sites in the 1930s. In less than ten years, as a result of great effort and much suffering for the population, a new heavy industry was created in the Urals that exploited the rich natural resources in the region. The Russian personalities described in this chapter belonged to politi- cal parties and groups that can be called ‘history’s victors’. In Russia, a complex party system started to emerge in the early 1900s. However, the ‘alternatives’ of the liberal and conservative political parties were never to be actualised by history. 1 Ultimately, the most radical social democrats, the Bolsheviks, were the only real victors in the Civil War. Social democratic societies were founded in Cheliabinsk in the late 1890s.

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  Agents of Atrocity

  Leaders, Followers, and the Violation of Human Rights in Civil War

  • N. Mitchell(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Red on red conflict might also mark the end of the Civil War. The end is sometimes dated to late 1920 by the defeat of the White armies, which were handicapped with their poor discipline, repression, and authoritarian old regime connections. Yet, significant combat contin- ued after the defeat of the major White armies. In the spring of 1921, 50,000 Red Army troops led by the top Red Army commander, Mikhail Tukhachevskii, defeated the 15,000 defenders of the naval fortress on Kronstadt and treated the survivors with no mercy. 35 The sailors’ revolutionary pedigree and socialist demands provided no protection from Communist propaganda labeling them White, counterrevolu- tionary, and condemned. RED TERROR: “SENTENCE FIRST—VERDICT AFTERWARDS” 36 The toll in the Russian Civil War from disease, famine, combat, and in particular from the government’s routine execution and killing of noncombatants was on a different scale from either the English war that came before or the Israeli war that came after. All three civil wars are cases of extreme military threat to government, yet this constant threat is accompanied by a puzzling variability in violence. It is not unreasonable to include deaths from famine and so bring into the reckoning the catastrophic impact of Lenin’s economic policies. In 1921 the New Economic Policy to induce trade in agricultural production replaced the forced confiscation of War Com- munism, which had effectively destroyed the peasants’ incentive to cultivate food for any but themselves. The savagery of the forces sent to requisition food precipitated peasant revolts in the provinces and resulted in urban hunger. Compounding the problem was the diffi- culty of transporting the food that was available. The civil war cut lines The Russian Civil War / 107 of communication and supply to the major cities. Urbanization actually reversed during the civil war period, as Russians, like Dr.

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  Sources of European History

  Since 1900

  • Marvin Perry, Matthew Berg, James Krukones, , Marvin Perry, Matthew Berg, James Krukones(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Beset by enemies at home and from abroad, the Bolsheviks at first appeared headed for defeat. By the autumn of 1920, however, they had prevailed over their opponents. The Whites suffered from ideological divisions and were dis-credited by their association with the tsarist regime. In addition, Lenin cannily played the nationalist card against the Whites on account of their ties to foreign powers. The Reds also benefited from greater popular support, interior lines of communication, and superior political and propaganda skills. The intervention-ists, weary of fighting that had begun in 1914, soon ended their attempts to over-throw the Bolsheviks by force. The Communist victory in the civil war came at a price. A total of 1.2 million combatants perished. The Reds, moreover, killed approximately 250,000 peasants for their resistance to grain requisitions and executed tens of thousands of political opponents. In addition, 100,000 Jews perished, most as victims of pogroms perpetrated by the Whites. Even after the armed struggle had ceased, Russia’s suf-fering continued. The famine of 1921–22 claimed around five million victims. I. I. Vatsetis and Alexis Babine THE RED TERROR Like all conflicts of its kind, the Russian Civil War was incredibly brutal and wit-nessed countless atrocities on both sides. In July 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas II and his entire family just east of the Ural Mountains in Ekaterinburg, to which they had been removed. In August, a Socialist Revolutionary named Fannie Kaplan fired shots at Lenin. To deal with the formidable military obstacles confronting them, the Bolsheviks created the Red Army and filled it with the remnants of the former tsarist army. The Red Army became an effective fight-ing machine, whipped into shape under the personal command of Leon Trotsky, who reintroduced capital punishment into Russia after its abolition by the Pro-visional Government.

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  History for the IB Diploma: Imperial Russia, Revolutions and the Emergence of the Soviet State 1853–1924

  • Sally Waller(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In the second half of 1918, Italian, French and American troops joined the Japanese in the Far East, while British and French troops entered the Caucasus and Black Sea area. There were also German armies on the western borders of Russia and in Ukraine. In all, 250,000 troops, from more than 14 different states, took part in the fighting. A map illustrating the Russian Civil War 1918–21 km 0 2000 0 2000 miles Black Sea Caspian Sea Murmansk POLES Yudenich BRITISH, AMERICANS, FRENCH, CANADIANS, ITALIANS, FINNS Kolchak JAPANESE, AMERICANS CZECH LEGION FRENCH Deniken Wrangel FRENCH & BRITISH Arkhangelsk Petrograd Memel Baku Batum Rostov Odessa Sebastopol Moscow Smolensk Astrakhan Aktyubinsk Kazan Simbirsk Omsk Vladivostok Lake Aral Lake Baikal Trans-Siberian Railway Area controlled by Bolsheviks Foreign help to White Russians Siberia 185 Lenin’s Russia 1917–24 Activity Make a diagram to show the different sides in the civil war and their aims. Identify the main problems that each side would be likely to have. By early 1919, all the White forces acknowledged Admiral Alexander Kolchak as their overall commander. This allowed him to plan a triple offensive in March. Kolchak himself advanced towards Moscow from western Siberia with Czech support, while Denikin led an offensive from the south, and General Yudenich marched on Petrograd from Estonia. It was a tense time for the Leninist government, particularly when Yudenich reached Gatchina on the outskirts of Petrograd. However, the Bolshevik military effort was increased and the attacks were subdued, so that the Reds gradually got the upper hand during 1920. The Whites also lost crucial foreign support – in April, Denikin resigned in favour of General Wrangel, and fled to the west. Wrangel was then defeated in November, when the remaining White forces in the south were evacuated by British and French ships.

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