What Was the Russian Civil War?

The civil war was set off on 25 May 1918, when a Czechoslovak Legion mutinied at Chelyabinsk on the Trans-Siberian Railway and within two months had seized most of the railway from the Volga to the Pacific. The Czechoslovaks, about 50,000 former prisoners-of-war of the Austro-Hungarian army recruited by the Entente to fight on the Western Front, were being moved to Vladivostok to be evacuated when the Bolsheviks tried to disarm them. The revolt gave the various anti-Bolshevik forces — the former officers of the imperial army, the Cossacks, the SRs, the Bashkir and Kazakh nationalists, the peasant greens — a focus. By the autumn of 1918 the Bolsheviks controlled a roughly circular territory of about 400,000 square kilometres in the centre of European Russia, with about 30 million of the empire’s 175 million people (Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996; Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, 2002).

The forces

The Red Army, built by Leon Trotsky from a small socialist militia in the spring of 1918, was by the end of 1920 the largest army in the world. By the 1920 figures, the Red Army had about 5 million men under arms, 78,000 Communist Party members in its political commissariat, and about 50,000 former imperial army officers serving as military specialists under the watchful eye of the Cheka. The army was financed by the central state and held together by the combination of military discipline, political control, and the appeal of a revolutionary war against the capitalist encirclement.

The White armies never achieved comparable cohesion. The four principal White leaders — Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in Siberia, Generals Anton Denikin in southern Russia, Nikolai Yudenich in the northwest, and General Pyotr Wrangel in the Crimea — operated independently, had no common command, and were politically incompatible. The largest single White force, Kolchak’s army in Siberia, was about 400,000 men at its peak in 1919, and Denikin’s Volunteer Army in the south had about 100,000; the Western-backed and the Czecho-Slovak forces brought the total White number to about 1 million (Holquist, 2002).

The course of the war

The war was fought in four main theatres.

In the east, the Czechoslovak revolt was the immediate cause. Kolchak, the former imperial naval minister and a Russian commander of the imperial navy, took over the White command in November 1918, advanced towards the Volga in the spring of 1919, and was pushed back by the Red Army under Sergei Kamenev and Mikhail Tukhachevskii in the summer.

In the south, Denikin’s Volunteer Army advanced on Moscow in 1919 but was turned back at Orel in October. The next year, in April 1920, Denikin was replaced by Wrangel, who held the Crimea for three more months. The Red Army took the Crimea in November 1920.

In the northwest, Yudenich advanced on Petrograd in the autumn of 1919 and was turned back at Pulkovo Heights on 23 October, only 12 miles from the centre of the city.

In Poland, the Red Army advanced into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the spring of 1920, took Kiev in May 1920, and was stopped at the gates of Warsaw in the Battle of Warsaw of 15-25 August 1920 — the Miracle on the Vistula in the Polish version, the Cud nad Wisłą of Pilsudski’s Polish Legion. The Polish-Soviet war was ended by the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921, which gave the Poles large parts of Belarus and Ukraine (Figes, 1996).

The violence

The civil war was a war of the entire social body. The Red Terror, formally proclaimed by the Cheka in September 1918 after the attempted assassination of Lenin by the SR Fanny Kaplan, was the systematic use of the security apparatus to suppress the opposition. The Cheka and the revolutionary tribunals were responsible for an estimated 50,000-200,000 summary executions in 1918-1922, and for the operation of the first Soviet concentration camps.

The White Terror, especially in southern Russia and Ukraine, was a different phenomenon. The Volunteer Army and the Ukrainian nationalist forces led by Symon Petliura were responsible for large-scale pogroms against the Jewish population of Ukraine: the 1919-1920 pogroms claimed an estimated 50,000-100,000 Jewish victims, and the 1918-1920 pogroms in total probably 100,000-200,000. The civil war’s violence extended to the peasantry, the Cossacks, and the Russian political émigrés, and it continued in the form of the Tambov peasant rebellion of 1920-1921, the Bashkir and Kazakh revolts of 1919-1920, and the Kronstadt sailors’ revolt of February-March 1921 (Holquist, 2002).

The famine of 1921-1922

The civil war ended in a famine. The 1921-1922 famine, one of the worst in Russian history, claimed an estimated 5 million lives (estimates range from 2 million to 10 million). It was caused by the collapse of agricultural production under the prodrazvyorstka (grain-requisition) of war communism, by the drought of 1921, and by the exhaustion of the state transport system. The famine, with its scenes of mass death on the Volga and in Kazakhstan, was the immediate cause of the NEP — Lenin’s New Economic Policy of 1921, which restored limited private trade (Figes, 1996).

The cost

The cost of the civil war was staggering. Soviet sources in the 1920s estimated 7 million dead (combatants and civilians); émigré sources, larger. The population of the former Russian Empire did not reach its 1914 level until 1926. The Russian Civil War was one of the deadliest conflicts of the twentieth century — comparable in scale to the First World War, and the cause of the first major political exile of the century, the so-called “first wave” of Russian emigration, of about 1.5 million people to the Baltic, the Balkans, Constantinople, Berlin, and Paris (Figes, The Crimean War, 2010).