Russian Civil War | Casualties, Causes, Combatants, & Outcome | Britannica (original) (raw)

Russian Civil War, (1918–20), conflict in which the Red Army successfully defended the newly formed Bolshevik government led by Vladimir I. Lenin against various Russian and interventionist anti-Bolshevik armies.

Seeds of conflict

Russia’s disastrous performance in World War I was one of the primary causes of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which swept aside the Romanov dynasty and installed a government that was eager to end the fighting. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) whereby Russia yielded large portions of its territory to Germany caused a breach between the Bolsheviks (Communists) and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who thereupon left the coalition. In the next months there was a marked drawing together of two main groups of Russian opponents of Lenin: (1) the non-Bolshevik left, who had been finally alienated from Lenin by his dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and (2) the rightist whites, whose main asset was the Volunteer Army in the Kuban steppes. This army, which had survived great hardships in the winter of 1917–18 and which came under the command of Gen. Anton I. Denikin (April 1918), was now a fine fighting force, though small in numbers.

At the same time, the Western Allies, desperately pressed by a new German offensive in northern France in the spring of 1918, were eager to create another front in the east by reviving at least a part of the Russian army. In March 1918 a small British force was landed at Murmansk with the consent of the local soviet. On April 5 Japanese forces landed at Vladivostok, without any approval.

Czechoslovak LegionMembers of the Czechoslovak Legion in Vladivostok during the Russian Civil War, 1918.

A further factor was the Czechoslovak Legion, composed of Czech and Slovak deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army, whom previous Russian governments had allowed to form their own units. In March 1918 the Bolshevik government agreed to let these units leave Russia by the Far East, but in May violent incidents took place during the evacuation, and on May 29 Leon Trotsky, commissar for war, ordered them to surrender their arms. They refused, defeated attempts of the local soviets to disarm them, and took control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In the vacuum created by this action, two anti-Bolshevik authorities appeared: the West Siberian Commissariat, of predominantly liberal complexion, based at Omsk; and the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, composed of Socialist Revolutionaries, based at Samara.

These events caused the Moscow government to crack down heavily on non-Bolshevik socialists. The Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary deputies were expelled from the central and local soviets and prevented from engaging in any organized political activity. Eventually, in September, the government proclaimed a campaign of “Red terror,” including shooting hostages and giving increased powers to the Cheka (political police) of summary arrest, trial, and execution of suspects.

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Assassination of the tsar and the battle for Ukraine

Nicholas IINicholas II after being taken captive, c. 1917.

Among the early victims of the civil war, which may be considered to have begun in earnest in June 1918, were the former imperial family. Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and his children had been moved in August 1917 to Tobolsk and in the spring of 1918 to Yekaterinburg. With the development of anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, the local soviet feared that Nicholas might be liberated. In the night of July 16–17, 1918, all the members of the family were taken to the cellar of their prison house and shot.

In the late summer the Communists’ hastily reorganized armed forces, the Red Army, recovered most of eastern European Russia. At Omsk, which became the centre of the anti-Communists, a new army was hastily trained under the command of Adm. Aleksandr V. Kolchak, with the assistance of British and U.S. military missions. Meanwhile the British forces at Murmansk were at war with the Communists. In August further British forces landed at Arkhangelsk, and the Japanese forces in the Far Eastern territories of Russia had been greatly reinforced.

In Omsk relations between the Socialist Revolutionaries and Kolchak steadily deteriorated. Kolchak and his officers disliked the left-wing views of the politicians and found it difficult to distinguish between Socialist Revolutionaries and Communists, lumping together all “Reds” as enemies. The conflict came to a head when, on November 18, 1918, Kolchak set up his own dictatorship. Kolchak’s coup d’état coincided with the collapse of Germany and the end of the European war.

At the beginning of 1919 Red Army forces invaded Ukraine. The remnants of the forces of the Socialist Revolutionaries, headed by Symon Petlyura, retreated westward, where they joined forces with Ukrainian nationalist forces from formerly Austrian Galicia. For the next months the mixed Petlyurist-Galician forces held parts of Ukraine; other areas were in the hands of anarchist bands led by Nestor Makhno; and the main cities were held by the Communists, ruling not directly from Moscow but through a puppet Ukrainian “government” in Kharkov (now Kharkiv). The defeat of Germany had also opened the Black Sea to the Allies, and in mid-December 1918 some mixed forces under French command were landed at Odessa and Sevastopol, and in the next months at Kherson and Nikolayev.