Civil War of 1917–1922

CIVIL WAR OF 1917–1922

The most decisive chapter of the Russian Revolution, the civil war raged between October 1917 and 1922. The traumatic experience of civil war served as a defining moment for the new Soviet state by embedding itself into both the people's and the state's outlook and behavior.

The origins of the Russian civil war can be found in the discrediting of the tsarist government that took place before World War I; in the social divisions that shaped politics before and during the Revolution of 1917; and in the Bolshevik leadership's belief in the importance of civil war, in the imminence of world revolution, and in the acceptability of applying coercion in setting up a dictatorship of the proletariat. Although historians disagree over when the civil war began, dating the event to the October Revolution of 1917 makes sense, because that is how contemporaries understood it. Moreover, armed opposition to the new Bolshevik government, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom ), arose immediately after October when officers of the Imperial Army, Mikhail Alexeyev, Lavr Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Alexei Kaledin, and others, formed the first counterforce known as the Volunteer Army, based in southern Russia.

During the civil war the Bolsheviks, or Reds (renamed "communists" in 1918), waged war against the Whites. A term used loosely to refer to all factions that battled against the Bolsheviks, the Whites were a more diverse group than the Bolshevik label of "counterrevolution" suggests. Those who represented the country's business and landowning elite did tend to express monarchist sentiments. In addition, Cossack military units that had enjoyed self-government and other privileges likewise held conservative political views. But many White officers opposed the autocracy and even harbored reformist beliefs.

Much more complicated were the Bolsheviks' relations with Russia's moderate socialists, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), and with both parties' numerous offshoots, who wished to establish a government that would include all socialist parties. The internecine struggle within the socialist camp persisted throughout the civil war, and flared up after the Bolsheviks routed the Whites in 1920. Fearing a White victory, the moderate socialists complicated this scenario by throwing their support behind the Reds at critical junctures. Moreover, left-wing factions within these parties allied themselves with the Bolsheviks. For instance, until mid-1918 the Bolsheviks stayed afloat in part owing to the support of the Left SRs, who broke from their parent party following the October Revolution of 1917 to join the Bolsheviks.

In some locales the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition even weathered the controversy over the Brest-Litovsk Peace with Germany, signed in March 1918, which otherwise sundered the alliance with the Left SRs, who withdrew from the Lenin government in protest. The peace ceded eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Finland, and Ukraine to Germany, as well as Transcaucasia to Turkey, in return for an end to hostilities. Ratifying the treaty sparked heated debate within the Communist Party, especially among the so-called Left Communists led by Nikolai Bukharin who backed the idea of a revolutionary war against Germany. Later, from September 1918 until October 1920, renegade Left SRs formed a new party called the Revolutionary Communists (RCs), who participated in a ruling coalition with the Bolsheviks in many Volga provinces and the Urals. The Bolshevik attitude toward the socialist groups that supported the Reds reflected the overall strength of Soviet power at any given time. When vulnerable, the Bolsheviks welcomed their socialist allies; otherwise the Bolsheviks sought to manipulate them through a process of co-optation amid repression.

Political opposition to the Bolsheviks became more resolved after they closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. Elected just days after the October Revolution, the assembly was slated to determine Russia's political future. Although Lenin did not dare cancel the elections, he had no reservations about dispensing with the assembly after the SRs and related populist parties won a plurality of just under half of the votes cast. Capturing roughly a quarter of the popular vote, the Bolsheviks fared best in the cities and within the armed forces. Recognizing the need for a military force more formidable than the worker Red Guards who had backed the Bolsheviks' bid for power in October, Lenin established the Red Army under Leon Trotsky shortly after dispersing the Constituent Assembly. Trotsky recruited ex-tsarist officers to command the Reds, appointing political commissars to all units to monitor such officers and the ideological education of recruits. That spring, support for the Bolsheviks within the proletariat began to erode as the Mensheviks made a comeback.

This early phase of the civil war ended with a spate of armed conflicts in Russian towns along the Volga in May and June 1918 between Bolshevik-run soviets (councils) and Czechoslovak legionnaires. Prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian armies, the legionnaires had agreed to be transported across Siberia and from there to the Western front in order to join the Allies in the fight to defeat the Central Powers. The Czechoslovaks' clash with the Soviet government emboldened the SR opposition to set up an anti-Bolshevik government, the Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly, Komuch, in the Volga city of Samara in June 1918. Many delegates elected to the Constituent Assembly congregated there before the city fell to the Bolsheviks that November. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks expelled Mensheviks and SRs from local soviets, while the Kadets convened in the Siberian city of Omsk in June 1918 to establish a Provisional Siberian Government (PSG). The rivalry between Samara and Omsk resulted in the last attempt to form from below a national force to oppose Bolshevism, a state conference that met in Ufa in September and set up a five-member Directory after its French revolutionary namesake. But in November the military removed the socialists and installed Admiral Kolchak in power. Remaining official leader of the White movement until defeat forced him to resign in early 1920, he kept his headquarters in Siberia.

Although its role is often exaggerated, international ("Allied") intervention bolstered the White cause and fuelled Bolshevik paranoia, providing "evidence" for the party's depictions of the Whites as traitorous agents of imperialist foreign powers. Dispatching troops to Russia to secure military supplies needed in the war against Germany, the Allies deepened their involvement as they came to see Bolsheviks as a hostile force that promoted world revolution, renounced the tsarist government's debts, and violated Russia's commitment to its allies by concluding a separate peace with Germany. Allied intervention on behalf of the Whites became more active with the end of World War I in November 1918, when the British, French, Japanese, Americans, and other powers sent troops to Russian ports and rail junctures. Revolutionary stirrings in Germany, the founding of the Third Communist International in Moscow in March 1919, and the establishment of a soviet republic in Hungary at roughly the same time heightened the Allies' fears of a Red menace. Yet the Allied governments could not justify intervention in Russia to their own war-weary people. Lacking a common purpose and resolve, and often suspicious of one another, the Allies extended only half-hearted support to the Whites, whom they left in the lurch by withdrawing from Russia in 1919 and 1920— except for the Japanese who kept troops in Siberia for several more years.

Both Reds and Whites turned increasingly to terror in the second half of 1918, utilizing it as a substitute for popular support. Calls to overthrow Soviet power, followed by the assassination of the

German ambassador in July, which the Bolsheviks depicted as the start of a Left SR uprising designed to undercut the Brest-Litovsk Peace, provided the Bolsheviks with an excuse to repress their one-time radical populist allies and to undermine the Left SRs' popularity in the villages. Moreover, with Lenin's knowledge, Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed on July 16, 1918. Following an attempt on Lenin's life on August 30, the Bolsheviks unleashed the Red Terror, a ruthless campaign aimed at eliminating political opponents within the civilian population. The Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Cheka), set up in December 1917 under Felix Dzerzhinsky, carried out the Red Terror. Seeking to reverse social revolution, the Whites savagely waged their own ideological war that justified the use of terror to avenge those wronged by the revolution. Putting to death communists and their sympathizers, and massacring Jews in Ukraine and elsewhere, the Whites were determined to sweep the "Germano-Bolsheviks" from power.

The Whites posed a more serious threat to the Red republic after the Allies defeated Germany in late 1918 and decided to back the Whites' cause. Soon, the Whites engaged the Reds along four fronts: southern Russia, western Siberia, northern Russia, and the Baltic region. Until their rout in 1920, White forces controlled much of Siberia and southern Russia, while the Reds, who moved their capital to Moscow in March 1918, clung desperately to the Russian heartland. The Whites' ambitious three-pronged attack against Moscow in March 1919 most likely decided the military outcome of their war against the Reds. Despite their initial success, the Whites went down in defeat that November, after which their routed forces replaced General Denikin with Petr Wrangel, the most competent of all of the White officers. Coinciding with an invasion of Russia by forces of the newly resurrected Polish state, the Whites opened one final offensive in the spring of 1920. When Red forces overcame Wrangel's army in November, he and his troops evacuated Russia by sea from the Crimea. In the meantime, the Bolsheviks' conflict with the Poles ended in stalemate; the belligerent parties signed an armistice in October 1920, followed by the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which transferred parts of Ukraine and Belorussia to Poland.

Apart from their military encounters with the Whites, the Bolsheviks also had to contend with a front behind their own lines because of the appeal of rival socialist parties and because Bolshevik economic policies alienated much of the working class and drove the peasantry to rise up against the requisitioning of grain and related measures. Known subsequently as war communism, the series of ad hoc policies designed to prosecute the war and to experiment with socialist economic principles was characterized by centralization, state ownership, compulsion, the extraction of surpluses—especially requisitioning of grain, forced location of labor, and a distribution system that rhetorically privileged the toiling classes. Despite the popularity of Bolshevik land reform, which placed all land in the hands of peasants, requisitioning and other measures carried out in 1919 with shocking brutality drove the peasantry into the opposition. The effect of Bolshevik economic policies on the starving and dying cities as well as the party's violations of the political promises of 1917 also turned workers anti-Bolshevik by civil war's end.

Studies tapping long-closed Russian archives underscore the vast scale of workers' strikes and violent peasant rebellions known collectively as the Green movement throughout Russia in early 1921. The enormity of the opposition convinced the communists to replace war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), which swapped the hated grain requisitioning with a tax in kind and restored some legal private economic activity. The necessity of this shift in policy from stick to carrot was made clear when, in early March 1921, sailors of the Kronstadt naval fortress rose up against the Bolsheviks whom they had helped bring to power. Demanding the restoration of Soviet democracy without communists, the sailors met with brutal repression that the party's top leaders sanctioned. Although most historians view the Kronstadt uprising, worker disturbances, the peasant movement, and the introduction of the NEP as the last acts of the civil war, after which the party mopped up remaining pockets of opposition in the borderlands, the famine of 1921 can be said to mark the real conclusion to the conflict, for it helped to keep the Bolsheviks in power by robbing the population of initiative. Holding the country in its grip until late 1923, the famine took an estimated five million lives; millions more would have perished without relief provided by foreign agencies such as the British Save the Children Fund and the American Relief Administration.

Moreover, the Bolshevik Party took advantage of mass starvation to end its stalemate with the Orthodox Church. Believing that a materialistic worldview needed to replace religion, the Bolsheviks had forced through a separation of church and state in 1917 and removed schools from church supervision. Once famine hit hard, the party leadership promoted the cause of Orthodox clergy loyal to Soviet power, so-called red priests, or renovationists, who supported the party's determination to use church valuables to finance famine relief. Party leaders allied with the renovationists out of expediency: They had every intention of eventually discarding them when they were no longer needed.

The defeat of the Whites, the end of the war with Poland, and famine made it possible for the Lenin government to focus on regaining breakaway territories in Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Siberia, and elsewhere, where issues of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, class, foreign intervention, and differing levels of economic development and ways of life complicated local civil wars. Russians had composed approximately 50 percent of the tsarist empire's multinational population in which more than a hundred languages were spoken. An increasingly contradictory and even repressive tsarist nationality policies had given rise to numerous grievances among the non-Russian population, but only a minority of intellectuals in the outlying areas before World War I had championed the emergence of independent states. The Revolution of 1917, however, gave impetus to national movements as the provisional government struggled to maintain its authority in the face of potent new challenges from some of the country's minorities.

In January 1918 the Commissariat of Nationalities headed by Joseph Stalin confirmed the Soviet government's support of self-determination of the country's minorities, and characterized the new state as a Federation of Soviet Republics. The first Soviet constitution of July 1918 reiterated these claims, without specifying the nature of federalism. The cost of survival, however, made it necessary to be pragmatic and flexible. For this reason, Lenin soon made it clear that the interests of socialism were more important than the right of self-determination.

Indeed, by 1918 independent states had arisen on the Soviet periphery. Fostered by intellectuals and politicians, local nationalisms tended to develop into political movements with popular support in territories most affected by industrial development. Often, however, class and ethnic conflicts became entangled as these territories turned into major battlefields of the civil war and arenas of foreign intervention.

For instance, Ukraine, where the activities of peasant rebel Nestor Makhno obscured the intertwining hostilities among Reds, Whites, Germans, and Poles, changed hands frequently. Under the black flag of anarchism, Makhno first formed a loose alliance with the communists, but then battled against Red and White alike until Red forces crushed his Insurgent Army in 1920. In the Caucasus, Georgian Mensheviks, Armenian Dashnaks, and Azeri Musavat established popular regimes in 1917 that attempted a short-lived experiment at federalism in 1918 before hostilities between and within the groups surfaced, leaving them to turn to foreign protectors. By 1922 the Red Army had retaken these territories, as well as the mountain regions of the northern Caucasus, where they fought against religious leaders and stiff guerrilla resistance. In Central Asia the Bolsheviks faced stubborn opposition from armed Islamic guerrillas, basmachi, who resisted the Bolshevik takeover until 1923. The Bolsheviks' victory over these breakaway territories led to the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December 1922. Smaller than its predecessor, the new Soviet state had lost part of Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as part of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Armenia. Granting statehood within the framework of the Russian state to those territories it had recaptured, the Soviet government set up a federation, a centralized, multiethnic, anti-imperial, socialist state.

In accounting for the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, historians have emphasized the relative discipline, self-sacrifice, and centralized nature of the Bolshevik Party; the party's control over the Russian heartland and its resources; the military and political weaknesses of the Whites, who, concentrated on the periphery, relied on Allied bullets and misunderstood the relationship between social policy and military success; the local nature of peasant opposition; the inability of the Bolsheviks' opponents to overcome their differences; the tentative nature of Allied intervention; the effectiveness of Bolshevik propaganda and terror; and, during the initial stage of the conflict, the support of workers and the neutrality of peasants. In defeating the Whites, the Bolsheviks had survived the civil war, but the crisis of early March 1921 suggests that mass discontent with party policies would have continued to fuel the conflict if the party had not ushered in the NEP and if the famine had not broken out.

The Russian civil war caused wide-scale devastation; economic ruin; loss of an estimated seven to eight million people, of whom more than five million were civilian casualties of fighting, repression, and disease; the emigration of an estimated one to two million others; and approximately five million deaths caused by the famine of 1921–1923. Moreover, the civil war destroyed much of the country's infrastructure, producing a steep decline in the standard of living as industrial production fell to less than 30 percent of the pre-1914 level and the amount of land under cultivation decreased sharply. The civil war also brought about deurbanization, created a transient problem of enormous proportions, militarized civilian life, and turned towns into breeding grounds for diseases. Furthermore, war communism strengthened the authoritarian streak in Russian political culture and contributed to the consolidation of a one-party state as the population turned its attention to honing basic survival strategies.

The price of survival was the temporary naturalization of economic life, famine, and the entrenchment of a black market and a system of privileges for party members. While the sheer enormity of the convulsion brought about a primitivization of the entire social system, it was not simply a matter of regression, but also of new structuring, which focused on the necessities of physical survival. The social fabric absorbed those everyday practices that had been mediated or modified in these extreme circumstances of political chaos and economic collapse, as the desire to survive and to withdraw from public life created problems that proved difficult to solve and undermined subsequent state efforts to reconfigure society. In this regard the civil war represented a formative, even defining experience for the Soviet state.

See also: bolshevism; brest-litovsk peace; famine of 1921–1922; green movement; kolchak, alexander vasilievich; left socialist revolutionaries; lenin, vladimir ilich; menhsheviks; october revolution; red guards; red terror; socialist revolutionaries; sovnarkom; war communism; white army

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Donald J. Raleigh