Russian Civil War (1917-1922): Reds Against Whites

The Russian Civil War was a multi-sided conflict fought across the former Russian Empire from November 1917 to 1922, between the Bolshevik government, known as the Reds, and a wide range of opponents, above all the White armies. It killed an estimated 7 to 12 million people, mostly civilians, and ended with a Bolshevik victory that led to the creation of the Soviet Union.

Background: from revolution to civil war

The Russian monarchy fell in the February Revolution of 1917. The Provisional Government that replaced it continued the war against Germany and lost support. On 7 November 1917 (25 October in the old Russian calendar), the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin seized power in Petrograd in the October Revolution.

The new regime dissolved the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918, after the Bolsheviks failed to win a majority. In March 1918 it signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, giving up Ukraine, the Baltic lands, Finland and Poland. Many Russians, including patriotic officers and rival socialists, regarded the Bolsheviks as illegitimate.

Small anti-Bolshevik forces formed in the south almost at once. The Volunteer Army, led by Generals Mikhail Alekseyev and Lavr Kornilov, gathered among the Don Cossacks. Kornilov was killed in April 1918, and command passed to Anton Denikin.

The war spreads, 1918–1919

The conflict became full-scale in May 1918, when the Czechoslovak Legion, a force of some 40,000 former prisoners of war travelling east along the Trans-Siberian Railway, rebelled against Bolshevik attempts to disarm it. It seized much of the railway, and anti-Bolshevik governments formed behind it in the Volga region and Siberia.

The Bolsheviks responded by building the Red Army. Leon Trotsky, People’s Commissar for War from March 1918, used conscription, harsh discipline and thousands of former imperial officers, watched over by political commissars. He directed operations from an armoured train that travelled between the fronts.

In July 1918 Bolshevik guards killed the former tsar Nicholas II and his family at Yekaterinburg. After an attempt on Lenin’s life in August, the regime proclaimed the Red Terror, carried out by the Cheka, the secret police founded in December 1917. Both sides committed widespread atrocities, including mass executions and anti-Jewish pogroms, many of them by White and independent forces in Ukraine.

In November 1918 Admiral Alexander Kolchak took power in Omsk as “Supreme Ruler” of the White movement. In spring 1919 his armies advanced from Siberia towards the Volga but were thrown back from the summer onwards.

In the south, Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia launched a march on Moscow in July 1919. By October they had taken Oryol, less than 400 km from the capital. At the same time General Nikolai Yudenich advanced from Estonia to the outskirts of Petrograd. Both offensives were defeated in October and November 1919, and the Whites retreated in disorder.

The Whites suffered from fatal weaknesses. Their armies were separated by vast distances and could not coordinate. Their leaders often promised to restore landlords’ property and refused to recognise independence for Poles, Ukrainians and other nationalities, alienating potential allies.

Foreign intervention

Britain, France, the United States, Japan and other countries sent troops to Russia from 1918. They first aimed to secure Allied supplies and keep an Eastern Front against Germany, then to support the Whites. Forces landed at Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in the north, at Odessa and in the Caucasus, and at Vladivostok, where Japan sent around 70,000 soldiers.

Intervention was limited and war-weary publics opposed it. Most foreign troops had left by 1920, although Japan remained in Vladivostok until October 1922. The intervention nevertheless left lasting Soviet suspicion of the Western powers.

Wars within the war

The civil war was not just a contest between Reds and Whites. In Ukraine, power changed hands repeatedly between the Bolsheviks, Ukrainian nationalist governments, German occupation forces, the Whites and the anarchist peasant army of Nestor Makhno. Finland fought its own short civil war in early 1918, won by the anti-communist Whites with German help.

In the Baltic, Estonia and Latvia fought wars of independence against both Soviet and German forces. In the Caucasus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan declared independence in 1918, but all three were taken over by the Red Army in 1920–1921. In Central Asia, the Basmachi resistance continued well into the 1920s.

Many ordinary people experienced the war less as a clash of ideologies than as a succession of armies requisitioning food, horses and recruits. Villages changed hands several times, and banditry flourished wherever authority broke down.

War communism and the last campaigns

To feed its cities and army, the Bolshevik government introduced war communism: nationalisation of industry, a ban on private trade and forced grain requisitioning. Peasants resisted, and large uprisings broke out, notably in Tambov province in 1920–1921.

Kolchak was captured and executed in Irkutsk in February 1920. Denikin handed command to General Pyotr Wrangel, who held the Crimea until November 1920, when about 145,000 soldiers and civilians were evacuated by sea. A war with Poland in 1920 ended in a Soviet defeat at Warsaw and the Treaty of Riga in 1921.

The Kronstadt sailors’ revolt of March 1921 convinced Lenin to replace war communism with the New Economic Policy, which allowed some private trade. Fighting continued in Central Asia and the Far East, where the last White forces were defeated in 1922. Red troops entered Vladivostok on 25 October 1922, shortly after the Japanese withdrawal, and the Far Eastern Republic, a nominally independent buffer state, was absorbed into Soviet Russia the following month.

By the numbers

Key people

• Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924): leader of the Bolshevik government.
• Leon Trotsky (1879–1940): founder and commander of the Red Army.
• Alexander Kolchak (1874–1920): admiral and Supreme Ruler of the Whites in Siberia.
• Anton Denikin (1872–1947): commander of the White forces in southern Russia.
• Pyotr Wrangel (1878–1928): the last White commander in the Crimea.

Consequences

The Bolshevik victory secured one-party rule. On 30 December 1922 Soviet Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Transcaucasian republic formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, however, won their independence.

The war left the country devastated. Industry had collapsed, cities had emptied and the famine of 1921–1922 killed millions despite international relief efforts. The experience of siege, terror and centralised control shaped the Soviet state for decades.

Timeline

• 1917, 7 November: The Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd.
• 1918, 3 March: The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk takes Russia out of the First World War.
• 1918, May: The Czechoslovak Legion revolts along the Trans-Siberian Railway.
• 1918, 17 July: The former tsar and his family are killed at Yekaterinburg.
• 1918, 18 November: Kolchak becomes Supreme Ruler in Omsk.
• 1919, October: Denikin’s advance on Moscow and Yudenich’s attack on Petrograd are halted.
• 1920, 7 February: Kolchak is executed in Irkutsk.
• 1920, November: Wrangel’s forces evacuate the Crimea.
• 1921, March: The Kronstadt revolt leads to the New Economic Policy.
• 1922, 30 December: The Soviet Union is formed.

Why it matters

The Russian Civil War decided that the world’s largest country would be ruled by a communist regime. Its violence, terror and economic upheaval laid the foundations of the Soviet Union, which shaped global politics for most of the twentieth century.