Russian Civil War

The causes

Exhausted by the First World War, Russia went through a revolution in 1917: Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and the provisional government that succeeded him continued an unpopular war without resolving the economic crisis or the agrarian question. In October 1917 (November in the Gregorian calendar), Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. This coup immediately provoked opposition from many groups, from monarchists to moderate socialists.

The 1917 revolution had deep roots. Defeat by Japan in 1905 and the revolution of the same year forced the tsar to create a Duma, but the peasantry, the majority of the population, remained poor and hungry for land. The Bolshevik party, born from a split in Social Democracy in 1903, had a disciplined organisation and a simple programme: peace, bread and land. The failed coup of General Kornilov, in August 1917, weakened the Provisional Government and allowed the Bolsheviks to arm themselves. In September, they won the majority in the soviets of Petrograd and Moscow.

The course of the war

In January 1918, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly, which had been elected in November 1917. In March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the war with Germany, at the cost of vast territories. Leon Trotsky organised the Red Army, which became the Bolsheviks' main military instrument. On both sides, violence took hold, with the Red Terror and the White Terror; the former imperial family was executed at Yekaterinburg in 1918. British, French, American and Japanese troops intervened on several fronts, from northern Russia to the Far East.

In 1919, the White armies launched simultaneous offensives: Kolchak in the east, in Siberia, and Denikin in the south, which came close to Moscow in the autumn. The Reds regained the upper hand by taking advantage of the division among their opponents. Kolchak was captured and then executed in 1920. The Polish-Soviet War of 1920 then mobilised the Red forces, before the defeat of General Wrangel in Crimea. During these years, War Communism requisitioned harvests, which led to peasant revolts and shortages. In 1922, the USSR was created.

In spring 1918, soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion, who sought to reach the Western Front by crossing Siberia, rose against the Bolsheviks. They seized towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway, including Samara, and paved the way for anti-Bolshevik governments in Siberia. In November 1918, Admiral Kolchak, installed at Omsk, proclaimed himself supreme ruler of Russia. In the south, the Volunteer Army, founded by Generals Alekseyev and Kornilov, became the first core of the White armies; Kornilov was killed in combat in April 1918.

In Ukraine, control changed hands several times. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, German troops occupied the country and installed a conservative government, before leaving at the end of 1918. Peasant bands, such as those of Nestor Makhno, fought both the Whites and the Reds. In the Tambov region, in 1920 and 1921, a peasant uprising against requisitions was crushed harshly. In March 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt, who had supported the revolution in 1917, revolted against Bolshevik rule, and the repression was bloody.

For the Bolsheviks, the reconquest of the Far East came late. In 1920, they created the Far Eastern Republic, a buffer state formally independent, meant to spare Japan. Japanese troops, present in Vladivostok, only evacuated the city in October 1922, a few weeks before this state was dissolved into Soviet Russia. The same year, Russia became the USSR. The country emerged from the war diplomatically isolated, and its relations with the Western powers remained for a long time marked by mistrust.

The consequences

The Bolsheviks emerged victorious and established a one-party regime, backed by a political police, the Cheka, which practised terror. The war ruined the economy, and the famine of 1921-1922 claimed a very large number of victims. Part of the elites and former supporters of the tsarist regime went into exile. In 1921, the NEP replaced War Communism with a more flexible economy, without calling the party's power into question. The regime would last until 1991.

The Russian emigration that fled the war, sometimes called the White emigration, settled in Paris, Berlin or Prague, and kept a memory hostile to the Soviet regime. In the USSR, the victory was presented as that of a people's army: 23 February, the day the Red Army was founded in 1918, became an official holiday. Historians debate the role of the war in the establishment of a militarised state, a political police and a party that presented itself as the sole heir of the revolution. In post-Soviet Russia, the memory of the war remained disputed until the opening of the archives after 1991.

Timeline

1. 1917The Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd
2. 1918Creation of the Red Army, led by Trotsky
3. 1919Offensives by the White armies of Kolchak and Denikin
4. 1920Defeat of General Wrangel in Crimea
5. 1922Creation of the USSR

Key figures

• Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks, who seized power in 1917
• Leon Trotsky, organiser and leader of the Red Army
• Alexander Kolchak, White admiral, leader of the White armies in Siberia
• Anton Denikin, White general, leader of the White armies in the south