Russian Civil War 1918-1920

• What happened to central authorities in the Russian civil war?

  In Russian civil war, central authorities disappeared and local areas were left to fend for themselves.
• Was it common for units of soldiers to change sides?

  common for units of soldiers to change sides, fighting for the whites and later the reds-depending on how saw their interests and advantages could obtain.
• What atrocities were committed by sides within the civil war?

  • this due to fear and resentment.
  • cossacks in the south, raped and murdered whole villages of jews in pograms that may have taken 115,000 lives in the ukraine alone.- claimed the jews supported the bolsheviks.
  • whites routinely shot miners who did not produce enough coal
  • in rostov- buried hundreds of red miners alive.
  • in kharkov, the reds nailed the epaulettes of officers to their soldiers while they were still alive.
• What was the biggest killer?

  • disease.
  • typhus- spread among the lice-ridden troops and the civilian population. (over mil died in 1920).
  • 450,000 were killed by disease over the whole period while 350,000 were killed in the fighting.
• What followed the Bolsheviks crushing of the constituent assembly in January 1918?

  The outlawing of all other parties

  • shows how they were not prepared to share power
• What does modern research strongly suggest?

  That Lenin wanted a destructive civil war

  • although it involved obvious dangers to the Bolsheviks, Lenin was convinced that his forces could win and in the process wipe out all their opponents -> military and political
• What had Lenin feared?

  Had the Bolsheviks chosen to co-operate in a coalition of all the revolutionary parties in 1918, it would have had two consequences:

  • a successful counter-revolution would be easier to mount since the socialist parties would have had a popular mandate to govern
  • The Bolsheviks would have been unable to dominate government since they were a minority compared to the Social Revolutionaries
• When did the conflict begin?

  Summer of 1918
• What were the different colours in the civil war?

  Reds: the Bolsheviks and their supporters -> red being the colour traditionally associated with revolution

  Whites: the Bolsheviks' opponents, including monarchists looking for a tsarist restoration, and those parties who had been outlawed or suppressed by the new regime -> white traditionally associated with the Russian monarchy

  Greens: groups from the national minorities, struggling for independence from central Russian control -> Green symbolising freedom
• What did the Bolsheviks present the struggle as?

  Class war, however this was not the case:

  • the size of Russia meant that local or regional considerations predominated larger issues
  • significant number of Russia's national minorities such as Ukrainians fought to establish their independence
• Who was the best known of the Green leaders?

  Makhno, one time Bolshevik, who organised a guerrilla resistance to the reds in Ukraine
• What was the most ironic thing during the civil war?

  Although most of the leading Bolsheviks were non-Russian, their rule was seen by many as another attempt to reassert Russian authority over the rest of the country -> the same situation that had happened under the tsars
• What was an additional complication during the civil war?

  The disruption provided a cover for settling old scores and pursuing personal vendettas

  • it was not uncommon for villages/ families to be divided against each other
• On occasion, what was the cause of the fighting?

  Famine -> it became the backdrop for the civil war

  • the breakdown in food supplies that had occurred during the war against Germany continued until whole areas of Russia remained hungry
• What was a factor in the forming of the initial military opposition to the Bolsheviks in 1918?

  To end hunger

  • in addition to the problems of a fractures transport system
  • Lenin's government was faced with the loss of their main wheat-supply Ukraine
• What happened in March 1918?

  The bread ration in Petrograd reached its lowest ever allocation of 50grams per day

  • hunger forced many workers out of the major industrial cities
• What happened by June 1918?

  the workforce in Petrograd had shrunk by 60% and the overall population had declines from 3 million to 2 million
• What did the SRs organise as a challenge to the Bolsheviks?

  Organised an anti-Bolshevik coup in Moscow, which had replaced Petrograd as Russia's capital for security reasons
• What could the civil war be said to have begun?

  not as a counter-revolution but as an effort by one set of revolutionaries to take power from one another

  • in this sense, it was an attempted act of revenge by a majority party (SRs) against the minority party (Bolsheviks) for having usurped the authority that they claimed was theirs
• Why and who did the SRs join?

  In their bitterness at being denied any say in gov, they joined the whites
• SR anti-bolshevik challenge:

  • In Moscow
  • was violently crushed
  • 7 july 1918, the 2000 troops that the SRs were able to muster were scattered by Bolshevik artillery units
• Attempted assassination of Lenin: 


  
  

  • Srs terrorism
  • Happened both in July and August 1918
  • the second attempt by Dora Kaplan left him with a bullet in his neck that contributed to his death 6 years later
• The behaviour in the Summer of 1918 by the foreign armies still in Russia focused the Bolshevik struggle of sporadic armed resistance.
• Forty thousand Czechoslovak troops who had volunteered to fight on Russia's side in WW1 as a way to gain independence from Austria-Hungary were isolated after the treaty of B-L.
• The Czechoslovak troops reformed themselves as the Czech Legion and made the journey to Vladivostok.
• The aim of the Czech Legion was to rejoin the Allies on the Western Front in the hopes of winning international support for their independent state.
• Bolsheviks resented the presence of a well-equipped foreign army making their way across Russia.
• Local soviets began to challenge the Czech Legion.
• what encouraged the Whites and the revolutionary and liberal groups who had been outlawed by the Bolsheviks to come out openly against Lenin?

  • Famine
  • Challenges from the SRs
  • Assassination attempt
  • Czech Legion
• What were the key areas of conflict?

  • SRs organised a number of uprisings in central Russia and established an anti-Bolshevik Volga 'Republic' at Samara
  • A White 'volunteer Army', led by General Denikin, had already been formed in the Caucasus region of southern Russia from tsarist loyalists and outlawed Kadets
  • In Siberia, the presence of the Czech Legion encouraged the formation of a White army under Admiral Kolchak, the self-proclaimed 'Supreme ruler of the russian state'
• What were the key areas of conflict? part 2

  • In Estonia, General Yudenich began to form a White army of resistance
  • In Ukraine, Baron Wrangel led a 'Caucasus Volunteer army' against the Bolsheviks
  • White units appeared in many regions elsewhere. the speed with which they arose indicated just how limited Bolshevik control was outside the cities of western Russia
• General Anton Denikin

  An ex-tsarist general who had supported Kornilov in 1917 (Kornilov affair)
• Admiral Alexander Kolchak


  Former Commander of the Russian Black sea fleet
• General Nicolai Yudenich

  An ex-tsarist general who had distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War
• Baron Wrangel


  Served in the imperial army in the Russo-Japanese war and the first world war
• What made the Civil war a confused affair?

  The patchwork of political, regional and national loyalties inside Russia
• Reasons for Bolshevik victory:

  • White weaknesses
  • Red strengths
  • Role of Trotsky
  • Red brutality
  • importance of morale
• White weaknesses:

  • The various white armies fought as separate detachments
  • besides the obvious aim to overthrow the Bolsheviks, they were not bound together by a single aim
  • The whites were unwilling to sacrifice their individual interests in order to form a united anti-Bolshevik front. This allowed the Reds to pick off the White armies separately
• White weaknesses part 2

  • in the rare cases the Whites considered combining, they were too widely scattered geographically to be able to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the enemy
  • Too reliant on supplies from abroad, which rarely arrived in sufficient quantities, at the right place and time
  • Lacked leaders of the quality of Trotsky
• Red strengths:

  • they remained in control of a concentrated central area of western Russia which they were able to defend by maintaining their inner communication and supply lines
  • Petrograd and Moscow, the administrative centres of Russia, remained in their hands throughout the war, as did most of the railway network